Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

I can't get worked up and annoyed about Bruce in the way I can about some other rockers. He has an ear for a great line (the opening of "Hungry Heart" for instance) and I can forgive him a lot for that. He doesn't resonate with me and like the Replacements I think that's a cultural thing.

I also - and this is totally subjective - never get the impression Bruce ever thinks he's particularly cool. Which is not something I can say of most other 'real rock'n'roller' types, mainstream or otherwise.

File under yet to be discovered. I was listening to an apologetic defence of his work from Sean Rowley on the radio the other day, and it got me wondering again. People of my generation's first real exposure to him was the 'Born in the USA' air-punching era and that obviously wasn't likely to engender much interest. Yes, I know it was all ironic.

What I have heard of his 70's stuff sounds like I might grow to love it. That midwest blue-collar world his songs inhabit seems harder to relate to than any other, but even in 1988, I had the feeling Paddy McAloon was missing the point with the song 'Cars & Girls'.

At the moment, I'm afraid the song of his I like best is a 90s one - 'If I Should Fall Behind', which I only know from the Grant McLellan cover version.

Badly Drawn Boy is a Springsteen obsessive, which I thought was quite cute.

N.

And yes, Tom, he's got a very good ear for a line.

I heard the version of "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" when I was young and that is pretty spiff, I freely agree. Circa 1984, liking El Bruce was unsurprising for me as that was a pretty damn good radio year -- Chuck Eddy specifically called it as such in _Stairway to Hell_, and he was goddamn right. Thus liking all that stuff he made was a matter of course alongside all those singles from _Purple Rain_ and _Like A Virgin_ and etc.

Time went on and I proceeded to not care. I never cared enough to buy an album anyway, and the 'classic early singles' only made sense in my classic rock phase, which lasted about nine months in senior year.

Then I ended up in LA and encountered the first of Robert Hilburn's 345,234,843 printed sermons on How Bruce Springsteen Heals the Sick, Raises the Dead and Means More to Human Existence Than the Combined Efforts of Louis Pasteur, Billie Holiday and Charles Schulz. I encountered other blowhards. The music touched me with the impact of a dying flea. A roommate was obsessed with him to the point of near mania. I cried.

The end.

Frankly, the Walkabouts any day of the goddamn week, month, year, decade, century, etc. If the relative fame levels were reversed, I would cling to this assumption with even more deep, abiding passion because then I would have The People on my side. Even alone, though, it's comfy. And Frankie Goes to Hollywood's version of "Born to Run" is my fave.

i actually liked born_in_the_u.s.a when it came out at age 7, but later, i found it to be an obstacle in getting to love bruce, and i'm sure there are a ton of artists out there whose work at that time has kept people away from them.

as sterling said, it's funny what driving a car can do, especially when it's another dark and lonely night out on an empty anonymous new jersey highway and "born to run" comes on the highway. but i've been there, so i'll move on.

you can get by on the first five or so albums on the music and production alone -- unless of course you hate phil spector and are, therefore, destined to spend eternity in hell -- and the later stuff will stick if you find something in the lyrics that rings far too true. sure, he mines the same territory in a lot of his songs, but so do belle & sebastian and so did the smiths; except the kids in bruce's songs could kick the ass of their counterparts in the aforementioned.

ned, i think you have the same problem as tom: it's a cultural thing. ;)

It's not a cultural thing; I mean for god's sake Motorcycle Emptiness might as well be Bruce Springsteen on a literacy trip in terms of subject, and I know Tom likes the song, and I believe Ned does too. Whether that particular statement was tongue in cheek or not, it's a tired excuse and reasoning, one usually used by the saddest of Bruce Springsteen fans, the ones who "identify" with his sentiments, seemingly losing track of the fact that BRUCE'S CHARACTERS NEVER ACTUALLY MAKE IT OUT. Some positive role models to rock out to.

The thing is, I think it's the voice and the earnestness, which was already said. The stylistic values of it....the basic cultural and escape sentiments, lyrically, of Motorcycle Emptiness and Born to Run might be very similar in tone, but the style and vocalisings are entirely, 100% different. Bruce has a very sarcastic bent, a very dark bent, lyrically, but his style of music softens the blow and sometimes people just don't like it.

And those people are wrong, incidentally :P

Nebraska is half good but doesn't deserve the plaudits it gets as the Springsteen album it's cool to like.

The rest is pretty much DUD.

Nevermind that Born in the USA was my first record not meant to be played on the Fisher Price record player (with the STEEL NEEDLE)

Nevermind Tracks Nevermind the fact that Born to Run is one of the best driving albums ever when your top is down and it's summer and the road between Ventura and home stretches out and empty at night with no cops...

Nevermind he has out Dylan-ed Dylan

Nevermind that he can outrage The Man as he pushes the dark side of life. (41 Shots)

Nevermind the line "The record company Rosie, JUST GAVE ME A BIG ADVANCE!"

Nevermind the Live box set, reminding us just how powerful he was

Nevermind Time and Newsweek

Nevermind Thunder-Fucking-Road

Nevermind The cover of Jersey Girl

Nevermind Tracks

Nevermind the MTV Unplugged set where he scrapped the entire notion of an acoustic show and just plugged in and tore down the house

Nevermind everyone on this list who called him a dud.

well, Bruce isn't *that* bad! ;)

La Bruce just collectively calls to my mind a stunted bastard vision of music that presumes he was the sole carrier of the 'spirit of rock and roll truth' that the Beatles and Stones 'started' in the sixties. A CLAIM I HAVE ENCOUNTERED MORE THAN ONCE, though thankfully not here, and happily never from the man's own lips either, at least to my knowledge. Without that rhetoric I would just shrug and ignore him for somebody more interesting, but with it, frankly, he becomes a very very useful target to kick against. Perhaps only a straw man, but one I wouldn't mind seeing go up in flames.

The boy has fallen off of late, but... I'm reminded of the Bangs article where he describes how he dismissed this Maoist band as sounding like Bruce, and the band replied "oh, good, the working class like that stuff" or something of the sort, and I'm reading this thinking -- no. no. no. The correct answer is "oh, good. Bruce fucking rocks!"

What I appreciate about Bruce is how he can capture the majesty of a major chord. How so many of his songs have the same progression, but you don't realize it 'till you try to play 'em yourself. How he can take gospel music and write it to a girl instead. And yes, more of them damn anthems.

I mean.. I know that anthems aren't an alien concept to the UK -- after all, The Who were full of them. But maybe British anthems are a different type a "get off of my cloud" or "sod off" type, more cynical and pissy than dreamy and wide-eyed. Maybe this is, after all, because America is The Big Country, The Great Bitch, et cet. Maybe to get America you have to get just how there's always somewhere you might go, maybe.

Along these lines, "Not Fade Away" which is a novel by Jim Dodge is a great rock road story, sort of like the lighter side of Richard Hell's "Go Now" or the more earnest(?) side of Bruce McCullough's "Doors Fan" sketch (on his album, Shame-Based Man). Yes. Get that spirit of the open highway.

I will say, though, that I do lack a car and have never had one. That might serve as a better explanation. ;-)

I wish I wasn't misinterpreting.

Inspirational in some ways. I have often felt that England needed a Springsteen, albeit not just a a copycat 'rocker'; I mean, someone who would write about all the lost and found small-town lives. But to be fair, I suppose there is already a UK tradition here: the probably Jarvis Cocker is a case in point.

1. they don't understand that he's actually not as "pro-america" as they might think he is

2. they don't have as close a connection to "old school" code (which includes "old school" rock)

3. they are mostly college kids on their way up to some office job or whatever that is removed (if not far removed) from the "underworld" (the "blue collar" or "real" world) to get the lyrical sentiments

4. well, and...sometimes people just don't like something 'cause they just don't like it

I, however, do not apply to any of those 4. For I actually do "get" some of the appeal of Bruce (albeit, it took my until my mid or late twenties to get there). Sure, his overly sentimental (downright broadway or maudlin) look at the working class can be a bit (or a bunch) too much. And sure, his music can be too simple and/or too derivitive. But, that's a part of the whole. Familiarity in both music and lyrics, is a large part of the appeal of his stuff (and those like him, ala Mellencamp, etc). He just had the concept to put nearly a whole career on the working class/blue collar life like no other has (not in such a wide reaching broad sense, at least - other than Mellencamp, but Bruce did it a bit better and first).

Classics:

Having said all that, 'Nebraska' and 'Ghost of Tom Joad' are the only two full albums that I would declare anywhere near a "classic" state of existence (with 'Nebraska' being the one clear-cut vote). Many of the rest of his 70's and 80's albums have some good solid worthy singles on them, but. I can't go so far as to get 'The River' (for example) anywhere near a "classic" nod. That one, in particular, I find to be overrated (though still having the wonderful track "Stolen Car" and the title track deserving of 'Nebraska'-like attention).

Anyways, I forgot to mention to huge (to the point of shadowing) element as to one of the why's (or why not's) of enjoy/appreciating Bruce. Which is: DRIVING. Cars and driving is such a central and/or reoccuring figure/subject in his work that...I can't believe I forgot to touch upon that (only after reading some of the others posts, darn it). But yea, I do LOVE to drive. Which also helps to explain the appeal of Springsteen (to me, at least).

*By the way, I do own that McCulloch album 'Shame Based Man' and...love it (some really funny stuff and one of the very rare comedy albums worthy of many plays - if not it's own discussion here on "I Love Music"...anyone?). Every single one of my girlfriends (one present, others past) hated it. "And if (after torching the stolen car) you can still hear the Doors playing...then you have become...a DOORS...FAN!" I'm not a Doors fan, however.

I hadn't listened to this record in a couple of years, but god, it still sounded great. Actually, I kept getting shivers down my spine when it was playing and it had me close to tears a few times (mostly on "Thunder Road" and "Backstreets.") Listening to this today finally settled an ILM debate for me: Music can never affect me quite as much now as it did when I was a teenager. No record I've heard in the last few years, including Loveless, has had as much affect on me as Born to Run did this morning, and I know it's not just because Born to Run is such a great album. This is a record that got to me when I was young and emotionally vulnerable in a way that I'm not anymore, at the age of 32. I still feel music very deeply and appreciate and enjoy a wider range of music than ever, but music doesn’t completely overpower me the way it did when I was 15. Oh well.

Springsteen is still a big classic, by the way, despite all the incredibly corny lines on Born to Run.

"candy's room" is the grebtest song ever written about being in love w. a prostitute when you sound a bit like david bowie

Is this a new genre? Cos that'd be fucking incredible.

I still love Bruce Springsteen. Put on Rosalita and you will see me go insane.

Curious now to see the Jewel piece :)

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/a-search-for-truth-about-jewel-233904/

At the house, I strip the guest bed of its myriad pillows and leave Jewel alone to talk with her mother in the kitchen. As I lie under the covers flipping, through a glossy color picture book of Alaska, Jewel walks in wearing a green zipper sweatshirt and either sweat pants or cotton pants, I can’t remember which, and gets under the covers with me. She lies on her left side, I on my right. Between our heads is a large pillow, which blocks part of her face. We keep pushing the pillow down as we talk so we can see each other completely and feel more intimate. But we know the pillow can never be removed completely: That would be too intimate.

Holy shit

JEWEL: HOT, READY, AND ALASKAN!

Hahahaha, omg that is so ridiculous

C’mon Neil, were they cotton pants or sweatpants — I demand every detail of this rockcrit fantasy!

She's always crazy like that

“Dear Wenner Forum: I always thought the letters you print were made up, and never believed anything like that would happen to me. Now I’m sure a believer! Last week started out like any other week in my unremarkable job as an interviewer of rock stars and other celebrities…”

C’mon Neil, were they cotton pants or sweatpants — I demand every detail of this rockcrit fantasy!

― tumblin’ dice outro (morrisp),

Yeah, that made me laugh too

that's absurd. but what a great Springsteen interview. I hadn't read that one before. that "other people's fingerprints" thing is amazing, what a phrase.

The funny thing is that Nebraska has fingerprints all over it. Not quite the kind of fingerprints he's talking about here, but Springsteen wears his influences so much on the surface, you can easily listen to it and go "oh, here's Flannery O'Connor, here's Hank Williams, here's Suicide." And yet it doesn't keep the record from sounding like something totally original and distinctive. Of course that's a combo of influences you wouldn't find anywhere else.

I think I've mentioned it before, but I once audited a lecture/class taught by Steve Earle that, over the course of a week, tracked the progression of Hank Williams to Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen and, ultimately, to Earle himself.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/a-search-for-truth-about-jewel-233904/

LMAO

I think I've mentioned it before, but I once audited a lecture/class taught by Steve Earle that, over the course of a week, tracked the progression of Hank Williams to Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen and, ultimately, to Earle himself.

That's awesome! Where was this?

Old Town School of Folk Music here.

Man, I miss that place. I used to live in Lincoln Square, my last home in Chicago before I left Illinois.

Ha, I used to live in Lincoln Square, too. I recently saw a Google Maps photo of the Old Town School of Folk Music location, which is now…an empty lot. But then, the 400-square-foot “rear cottage” I used to live in is now a multi-story condo complex, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

It still exists! But now it's a big multi-space complex.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/bruce-springsteen-or-stephen-king

I keep thinking some Christmas season I should write "Bruce Springsteen song or It's a Wonderful Life?" and send it to McSweeney's.

"Bruce Springsteen song or Sandwich."

1. Born to Run
2. BLT
3. Turkey Club
4. Thunder Road
5. Grilled Cheese
6. Atlantic City
7. PBJ
8. The Price You Pay
9. The Promised Land
10. Reuben
11. Rosalita
12. Muffaletta

13. Torta of Love

14. I'm on Rye

That Stephen King one is actually pretty clever - see the key on the bottom, they are all real references (if often vague enough to be easy to generate)

Ha, didn’t have time to study it or even get to the key but yeah.

15. Marbleland

16. Devils and Crust

17. Land of Hope and Pretzels

19. Jungleham

20. Adam Raisin au Pain

21. Used Carbs

incident on foccacia

It's a Wonderful Life or a Bruce Springsteen song, here you go:

1.As a child, you watched your father being humiliated by someone richer and more powerful than him and swore that would never happen to you.

2.You feel a lifelong compulsion to help out your baby brother, even though he never does anything for you.

3.Your brother went off to war. You stayed home.

4.You feel trapped in this miserable little town and you’re going to get out, do great things, and take Mary with you.

5.You and Mary got married too young, and let’s face it, you’re not all that happy anymore.

6.You got Mary pregnant, and man, that was all she wrote.

7.You’re basically an honest guy, but when someone close to you commits a crime, you automatically cover for them.

8.The slow death of all your dreams has turned you into a seething mass of barely-controlled rage.

9.Overcome by the general crappiness of your life, you decide to drown yourself. You’re contemplating the water temperature when Clarence shows up and saves your life.*

*Technically this last one is a "Growin' Up" story rather than a song, but close enough.

the answer is...yes?

i love this

as far as I can tell, the answer to every McSweeney's "x or y" list is yes

i see now the conceit

I told my students that Bruce is my favorite singer and showed them a picture of him, bc I thought we'd bond more if they had something to make fun of me about. Mentioned offhand that today is his birthday (I was speaking French and birthday is a word they know) and for some reason they got all excited about that and crowded around one student's computer to look up this info and verify it. Middle schoolers are funny.

Now that I think about it, I don't think I knew any of my teachers' musical tastes up to middle school with the exception of the music teachers: IIRC, they were fans of Lionel Richie and Bobby McFerrin. May help explain why I never got excited about music classes.

ooh la la, la chef

le chef. dammit. i only have the compulsory Canadian 4 years, I'm sorry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDc5j0gpG3I

Thought the thread might enjoy this clip. I caught this on Twitter and started watching the show. It's ok. They could use the capoiera fighting alpaca a bit more.

"Bruce Springsteen song or Sandwich."

very belated xp: omg I just had a business idea so good it probably already exists. Local Hero, a Jersey-based sandwich shop using all ingredients sourced from local farms, including Bruce's.

https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/04/13/PAPP/e53ad3a8-4bf3-47da-8156-9d1b17f604cd-BruceHotDog.jpg

Do you think if we got Jon Landau's blessing on the name Bruce would show up at our grand opening and pose like that with our signature sandwich?

if we survive the signature sandwich debate

70 year old man eats hot dog: details at 11

Glory Dogs

We go down to the WC

Blew up the men’s room at Subway last night

lol

So despite my Springsteen obsession there are still quite a few of his middle/late albums that I haven't listened to all the way through because the idea of them depresses me. But I listened to the Late Era podcast about Human Touch/Lucky Town - which I really enjoyed - and it inspired me to finally listen to both of them. I knew people thought of Lucky Town as much better than Human Touch, and I think I was sort of dubious about that because I figured they were probably both bad. But yeah, I agree. Human Touch is pretty much trash imo. 57 Channels isn't that bad for what it is, and "Cross My Heart" is listenable, but yeah, this album sucks.

Lucky Town, on the other hand - it's a much better album, but if Bruce had suppressed HT and only released this one, and I had been around to buy it at the time, I think I would still have been intensely disappointed. Because this strikes me as a decent album by the Springsteen that we have now, the artist who's still talented, still works hard, but is just a much lesser artist than the guy who put out the first eight albums. If Springsteen put out an album like Lucky Town right now, it would get nice reviews and everyone would be pretty happy with it, because we don't expect BitUSA from him anymore. Following Tunnel of Love, though? It would have been a huge shock to the system even without Human Touch dragging it down.

Random thoughts:

Local Hero is my favorite song from Lucky Town by a lot. The tone is tricky but I think he gets it just right; it doesn't strike me as self-involved or self-pitying, just as an honest assessment of the pull of fame and the costs of it.

I wish Bruce would stop writing songs that sound exactly like Book of Dreams; it wasn't good the first time.

I know Tracks so much better than this album that I've come to think of the Tracks songs as the "real" versions; it's weird to hear lines from "Gave it a Name" in "The Big Muddy" and realize that at some point Bruce decided "The Big Muddy" was better and more deserving of being on an album than "Gave it a Name."

I probably have more thoughts but I've had a migraine all day and I should go to bed. Migraines muddy my thinking so anything else I wrote would come out garbled anyway.

I like Lucky Town too - it's a good album. I'm a little reluctant to combine it with Human Touch for a variety of reasons, but I think Jimmy Guterman had a pretty solid proposal, which was to add the title track "Human Touch" while dropping "Leap of Faith" (my least favorite cut). Some re-sequencing may be needed to make it work - maybe open with "Human Touch" and open side B with "Better Days"? - but I think it works.

I actually like "Book of Dreams" - I love how it fits into that flow of songs, it shores up the album thematically for me.

I have nothing against "The Big Muddy," but I do love "Gave It a Name"...I was surprised by this though:

While working on the box set, Bruce was unable to locate the master tape for GAVE IT A NAME, so he re-recorded the song with Roy Bittan on 24 Aug 1998 at Thrill Hill Recording (Springsteen's home studio) in Colts Neck, NJ, and hence, the song was the only track recorded from scratch specially for Tracks. The original recording probably took place in Dec 1990 or Jan 1991.

I'm not sure how different the original outtake would be, but the re-recording is a gem on its own.