Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

*"I turn into Yvonne in Casablanca," I meant to say - not "a Yvonne," although I supposed that works too.

I wish I'd known about Bruce Springsteen's UK concerts, and been able to attend one. I only find out about things after they happen.

Lily: I enjoy 'working on the highway' a lot, can't take 'darlington county' very seriously. What did you get out of hearing them together?

I'm not really a fan - admire more than love his work, with a few exceptions - but a friend messaged me a few days before the Saturday Hyde Park concert & said he had a spare & did I want it (no cost) & I thought I'd be an idiot not to. Didn't know 3/4 of the songs, felt a bit of a fraud pressed among the real fans but it was amazing, completely sucked me in and I am largely converted (tho going back to his albums afterwards I'm still a little disengaged, like I struggle to keep my attention switched on through any of them really. He seems to be a small doses artist for me).

I will never stop being amazed by the miracle that transforms songs you are only kind of okay with into a song that you absolutely love at the moment he's playing it.

From the perspective of a casual, otm. I would have said I didn't like GLory Days. Now I love Glory Days.

Love conversation stories like yours!

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My text messages to a friend literally go from "all these songs are the same song and everybody knows all the words. Luckily, I am high" about an hour in to "i love it i love all of it" about an hour later.

oh I should also say thank you to the Springsteen crew on here - over the years various threads (the poll especially) made me appreciate him more and then in the couple of days before the gig reading through ilx chat about him gave me context/pointers/places to start. So much thoughtful and loving discussion!

I enjoy 'working on the highway' a lot, can't take 'darlington county' very seriously. What did you get out of hearing them together?

Good question! Neither of them is exactly one of my favorite Bruce songs, though I like them both and I love "Child Bride," the song on the Nebraska tape that turned into "Working on the Highway." I think it has to do with a few things:

1. I love "Born in the USA," but a lot of it is made up of huge hits that it's no surprise to hear in concert. "Working on the Highway" and "Darlington County" are both (to the extent that anything on BitUSA can be minor) more minor songs off it, so hearing them back to back feels like getting a tiny snippet of the Born in the USA tour.

2. They're a pair, and one of the things I think is very cool about BitUSA is the way at least half the songs on it come in pairs: these two songs, then the Nebraska songs "Downbound Train" and "I'm on Fire," then "No Surrender" and "Bobby Jean." Almost everything on Born in the USA is wearing some kind of disguise, but these two have roughly the same disguise: they're both songs from the POV of men who are absolutely not succeeding at life, but who are presenting - maybe even seeing - their lives as a fun-times workin' man's anthem.

You've got Darlington County, which initially sets itself up as a story about a road trip from the POV of someone who doesn't actually know how to tell a story, so it's already sort of intentionally boring in a way I find funny, maybe because I've read so many boring personal essays by college students who went to Disneyland once. "Me and my buddy drove to another county to do union work and pick up hookers, and we listened to rock music on the drive" is very much not a story, but the narrator tells it like it is the most super cool thing that ever happened to anyone. But then the actually interesting part of the story - the part where Wayne disappears, never shows up for work, and then gets arrested for an unknown crime at the very end - happens mostly offstage and is never explained. And yet the narrator never, ever gets that this is actually a strange and potentially disturbing story about his buddy going off the rails; it's shalalas the whole way through.

"Working on the Highway" pairs with "Darlington County" because it's also disguised as a dudes workin' together anthem. What's behind it, of course, is a much more explicitly disturbing story about a guy who's in prison for basically grooming and kidnapping an underage girl. But you have that same sense of denial and the same way of hiding the real story behind a screen of working class masculine community; in both songs there's a feeling of anthemic togetherness, of dudes working together, traveling together, that dissolves, when you look closer at the song, into one dude completely on his own and not wanting to admit it. So the songs match with each other, in a way that they don't quite match with anything else on BiTUSA, though of course most of the songs on that album are wearing some kind of disguise. And I've never been quite sure whether Bruce knows that he structured BitUSA in pairs, so it's cool to get some kind of confirmation that he also sees these two songs as going together.

3. This one is more of a stretch, but... "Child Bride," the song that turned into "Working on the Highway," is obviously not a song I feel much sense of personal identification with, and yet there's a moment at the very end that I did very much identify with during the pandemic. It continues the story past the point where "Working on the Highway" stops, and the last verse is the narrator in prison, thinking about freedom.

There's nights I can't sleep
No matter how hard I try
So from my window I watch the moonlight
Fall on the far hillside
I imagine I put on my jacket
Go down to this little roadside bar
Pick a stranger and spin around the dance floor
To a Mexican guitar

There's something about the smallness of that fantasy, and the way it still feels so completely out of reach, the total impossibility of just putting on your jacket and going to an ordinary bar and hearing some music, that summed up a lot of the feeling of the pandemic for me. And last year, when everyone else was coming out of the pandemic and going back to their normal lives, I was sick in bed almost the entire summer. So hearing "Working on the Highway" sent my brain to "Child Bride," which made me very forcibly aware that after what felt like years of semi-isolation, I was at this exact moment in a foreign city by myself, dancing in a sea of happy strangers.

Amazing. Thank you for all of that!

This reading of the Boss as writing 'unreliable narrators', characters who say something without understanding that they're revealing something, songs that are really about something dark though the voice thinks it's light ... It's a very interesting approach and one that I first saw from ILM poster Dave Q, a remarkable character who posted here over 20 years ago.

Maybe it gains some credence from the genetic approach of hearing earlier versions (like 'child bride' which I don't know) which confirm what a song was really about before it was 'disguised'.

Nonetheless, while enjoying this approach, I'm slightly sceptical about it. I feel that the bar-room cheer of these two songs is more dominant than a dark underside. I don't feel too sure that we're really meant to think that the former is superficial, the latter the truth. In truth I'm not really sure that I think 'Darlington County' is very serious at all. Though it's more interesting if it is, and if you're right.

I strongly agree that 'Darlington County' is a very UN-interesting story on the face of it. I've always found that somewhat a drawback, though you're finding a different way around it, Lily.

FWIW the single thing that has always connected the two songs for me is the character, I think, 'handcuffed to a state trooper's Ford' (?) in the first song and the character being 'put in a black and white' in the second.

I think this is the really interesting paradox of Springsteen, that he's fundamentally interested in the way people need hope and will find hope where none exists, and that leads him to have this deep interest in the kind of false hope that rises out of isolation and desperation - something like Atlantic City, where the character's irrational hope for a better life is clearly leading him to an early death or a long prison sentence. But at the same time he recognizes that the line between false hope and real hope is a very thin one, and that this ability to make hope and joy and community out of nothing at all, while it can be deeply dangerous, is also sustaining and essential. So the songs on BitUSA aren't just dark songs disguised as fun party anthems, they are fun party anthems, but made out of the material Springsteen had to hand at that time, which was all dark. Despair and isolation transmuted by the alchemy of rock music itself, and by Springsteen's belief in its power to do pretty much anything, into a source of communal joy.

I hope that made sense, I feel like I could put it better if I weren't so jet lagged.

Like for instance I would not have said the words "interest" and "hope" one billion times in a row. Oh well.

There's a similar theme in both songs about escaping to a mythological paradise only to discover the destination just as fraught as the origin. Highways are of course an obvious connection between both songs, but they're also literal connections, tethers, if you will, to reality, pulling you back to the place you started from. That's certainly the case with the ironic conclusion of "Working on the Highway," which (like lots of Bruce) is itself tethered back to similar turns/themes in Chuck Berry travel/escape songs like "Promised Land" (god knows Bruce sure had that title/theme in mind a lot).

"So the songs on BitUSA aren't just dark songs disguised as fun party anthems, they are fun party anthems, but made out of the material Springsteen had to hand at that time, which was all dark."

I think that does convince me more than "this fun anthem is really a dark story in disguise".

I also reflect that when the Boss wants to be "dark", he can just be ... dark, and brooding. "darkness on the edge of town", "candy's room", "nebraska", whatever - so it's not as if he needs a (brilliant) disguise for this material.

re 'working on the highway':

'What's behind it, of course, is a much more explicitly disturbing story about a guy who's in prison for basically grooming and kidnapping an underage girl.'

The song doesn't state that she's 'underage', or that she's been kidnapped and left against her will. There is conflict with her family.

>>> Saved up my money and I put it all away
I went to see her daddy but we didn't have much to say
"Son, can't you see that she's just a little girl
She don't know nothing about this cruel, cruel world"

I don't take the father's description of the girl to mean that she is literally underage. And the fact that the narrator saves up his money and asks for her hand suggests a quite respectable and above-board romance, not the secret abduction of a minor.

But admittedly the fact that the narrator can be arrested suggests that he has committed a crime, supporting your view.

I think this is the really interesting paradox of Springsteen, that he's fundamentally interested in the way people need hope and will find hope where none exists, and that leads him to have this deep interest in the kind of false hope that rises out of isolation and desperation

At the end of every hard-earned day people need some reason to believe.

I think this is the really interesting paradox of Springsteen, that he's fundamentally interested in the way people need hope and will find hope where none exists, and that leads him to have this deep interest in the kind of false hope that rises out of isolation and desperation

At the end of every hard-earned day people need some reason to believe.

One might even say that everybody's got a hungry heart

Re: secret seduction of minors, I have a good friend that cannot listen to "I'm On Fire" because she always hears the "little" part of "little girl" literally.

Springsteen did seem to have this theme on his mind a lot at the time, not just explicitly in stuff like the proto-"Highway" "Child Bride," but also "Nebraska" (the song) which is of course based on a true story with the same general subject matter (man runs off with teen/underage girl; Caril Ann Fugate was 14). We're a long way from the ebullient courtship at the center of "Rosalita," or even romance of "Thunder Road."

The 'genetic approach' of pointing to earlier material, which seems valid, would also have to bring in - is it 'Spanish Eyes'? - to a reading of 'I'm on Fire'.

In 'I'm on fire' it is logical not to take 'little girl' literally if we agree not to take 'daddy' literally.

See, I always took "daddy" literally, but "little girl" as more of a casual nickname, a la "baby" (which rarely literally means "baby").

I feel like there is no way to read I'm on Fire without acknowledging how menacing it is. I didn't feel that way when I was a little girl but as an adult, it takes a lot of mental gymnastics to reframe it as anything but "appealing predator" (which is a real thing, fwiw, and I never thought of Bruce as That Guy himself but the character is def based on a type of person who exists)

Lily how fun to see him play those lesser BitUSA songs!! Thank you for sharing.

It's totally menacing! The jittery guitar strums, the ominous synth wash -- he's like the guy in "State Trooper" before he kills the cop.

Lily's posts awesome as usual, though I slightly disagree about "Darlington County" being "intentionally boring," or that the narrator doesn't know how to tell a story – I could listen to that guy talk all night! Where the girls are pretty but they just want to know your name... Our pa's each own one of the World Trade Centers... he's a total character. If anything, the details of Wayne's arrest are probably not worth going into; who cares about Wayne, lol

My introduction to "Working On The Highway":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCnF8BBsZmE

The thing about "daddy" and "little girl" is that you can say one or the other without it seeming particularly creepy, but put them together and you are suddenly very much in creep territory, which I think Bruce mines to ambiguously menacing effect in "I'm on Fire." I've always wondered if he was influenced there by Van Morrison's "He Ain't Give You None," which also puts those two words together and has the same "I don't know how old these people actually are but this whole thing is creepy as hell" vibe.

But "Working on the Highway" I think is very clearly about someone who is in prison for taking a minor across state lines; he took her to Florida and got arrested for it, and now he's on a road gang. I mean, it helps to know that it was originally called "Child Bride," but really the essentials of the story are still there in "Working on the Highway." If the song doesn't explicitly say it, I think that's just because the narrator doesn't quite get that he committed a crime. There's a disconnect in his mind the whole way through; he hears what he wants to hear and sees what he wants to see, and everything else gets elided. He talks to her father and her father says "She's just a little girl," and our narrator dismisses this as "We didn't have much to say," when in fact the dad is using the words "little girl" completely literally and is very clearly saying "Stay away from my child." He knows he got arrested, and he knows where he is, but there's no sense of cause and effect here; there's no sense that he did something bad and is reaping the consequences.

At the end of every hard-earned day people need some reason to believe.

But that's the thing that's so interesting, that I was trying to get at upthread - "Reason to Believe" is a super bleak song, just as "Atlantic City" is bleak, and they're both songs that are explicitly about the dangers of that kind of false hope. But Springsteen can also write something like "Badlands," or "Promised Land," where you know the narrator is kidding himself that his life is going somewhere good, and yet the song invites you to scream along with it in your car on your way to your shitty job, and there's a kind of double-exposed feeling of simultaneously knowing that it's a hopeless wish-fantasy and letting yourself be the narrator and believe in it for the space of the song. And then when he plays it in concert, and you're singing "I believe in a promised land," the sense of hope absolutely takes over; it's like singing a hymn.

Or take something like "Dancing in the Dark" - you can listen to alone in your room or dance to it in a stadium in a crowd of thousands, and it works both ways but very differently. One way you get depressed introspective restless FOMO, the other way you get fun party anthem, but neither one is the "real" meaning; they're just the two sides of the song.

Referring to one's SO as "my old man" or "daddy" or "my old lady" or mama" seems particularly 1970s.

Joni Mitchell did both ("My Old Man" and "you're a mean old daddy") on Blue. Jimi Hendrix sang "I'm going down to shoot my old lady." Madonna sang "You are my baby love." John Lennon sang both "Girl" and "Run for your life if you can, little girl."

Just a handful of examples but one could go on for hours. Ultimately up to you how you interpret "I'm on Fire."

I know this is totally introducing an extra-textual element to the analysis, but the object of grease-monkey Bruce's desire in the "I'm on Fire" video is definitely no little girl!!

But "Working on the Highway" I think is very clearly about someone who is in prison for taking a minor across state lines

It's his Chuck Berry song.

For fans of how the sausage is made, here's some recently unearthed/leaked pro-shot rehearsal footage from the Rising tour:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM0Wc9niIxY

Oh, wait, there are more parts!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-S71yAcDys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LcexriIpAI

Lotta interviews, nice to see Danny and Clarence.

wow!

bruce hugging/goofing with steve and clarence during the intro to tenth avenue freeze out. pure unadulterated e street joy.

part 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt7ROiatsk0

My kids have been separately and consistently asking to see Springsteen with me, not necessarily because they are fans but I think just because they are fans of me being a fan. I'd been watching the secondary market, and it's been disheartening to see the prices creep *up*, even for nosebleeds, maybe simply because the cheap seats are gone and whatever is left is whatever is left. Anyway, because of this I'd warned them that it was unlikely, but I checked the MLB site last night and actually found three respectable tickets, so bit the bullet. I was already seeing him on Friday with my wife, but now I'm seeing him on Wednesday with my kids, too.

Just realized that these Wrigley shows are his first back in the States since his Euro jaunt. Typically Bruce returns home extra fired up, and more prone to changing the setlist, but I wonder if that will still be the case. I suspect it will largely be the same songs.

There was actually a bit of a fight on social media over this, where someone (or some people?) complained about the setlist staying the same, and some people in Springsteen's orbit including Garry Tallent pushed back. I think it was a mess of responses to that complaint, but the main thing I got from it was that the setlist was meticulously built around a very strong theme and story arc that Springsteen wanted to get across, and it didn't make a whole lot of sense to carefully sequence anything for that reason only to rip it apart. (Also amusing in light of Caryn Rose's criticism of the tour, basically suggesting that this was one tour where Springsteen had a very specific narrative in mind that he wanted to tell through his songs.)

Actually got some coverage in Jersey (which probably isn't surprising):

https://www.app.com/story/entertainment/music/2023/07/24/bruce-springsteen-e-street-band-setlist-tour-garry-tallent-twitter/70456207007/

only to rip it apart.

Everybody's got a hungry heart

the setlist was meticulously built around a very strong theme and story arc that Springsteen wanted to get across,

I've heard this defense and it is total bullshit, unless that story arc is "Springsteen plays his songs." Iirc the "Tunnel of Love" tour was mostly static, that's probably the last time he did it. I imagine people are extra bummed, though, because his "Wrecking Ball" tour was among his most spontaneous and loose, with something like 215 songs played, and the "High Hopes" tour had 182 songs played. And then you get "The River," largely static by design. Then "Broadway," entirely static by design. And now this tour, practically static.

I think the notion that the E Street Band is somehow superhumanly trained to be uniquely capable of pulling off the death defying dynamics of Springsteen, and that even a static setlist is some amazing high wire act of precision, also largely bullshit. On this tour Nils, the most talented guitarist on stage, barely has anything to do, and most of Springsteen's stuff is pretty meat and potatoes, musically. So my guess is that the setlist is static because Springsteen, getting older and more reliant on routine (and teleprompter), needs it that way. And that's OK! I mean, most bands don't change the setlist, and besides, he brought any criticism on himself by setting the bar so high for so long.

Still OK to be bothered at least a little bit by the setlist, especially when he's wasting those precious minutes on disposable boilerplate like "Nightshift."

"that's probably the last time he did it."

During his peak years, at least.

I’ve been obsessively listening to “Missibg”, his gorgeous song from the opening credits of Sean Penn’s The Crossing Guard (1995). I would love to hear a “lost” album from the mid-90’s that is in this low tempo, almost trip-hop vein

Currently reading Deliver Me From Nowhere, Warren Zanes’ book on the making of NEBRASKA. Interesting stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised if he never releases the full band takes of the songs given comments that he makes in it

Iirc that "lost" album is supposedly slated for a set of five unreleased albums sometime in the near future.

whuuuut?

that's cute with your kids, Josh, enjoy the shows!

especially when he's wasting those precious minutes on disposable boilerplate like "Nightshift"

Fans gotta pee sometime.

self-xp
https://www.rock94.com/news/trending/the-boss-has-5-unreleased-albums-on-the-way/

aha cool!

The fan-favorite pee break this tour seems to be "Kitty's Back." There was a time that having that in the set was a special surprise, so I find it fascinating how fast some fans have turned on it now that it's in the set every night. But yeah, when I saw him in Brooklyn I think I went to the bathroom during "Nightshift."

Springsteen confirmed a long-standing rumor that one of his unheard albums is entirely based on drum looping. "That's going to be as weird as people think it's going to be," he said. "But it uses all drum loops and things like that, and it uses synthesizers.

Hi Bruce, welcome to 1997