Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

Another American job lost to high tech outsourcing

Saw her in the Sbarro's by the dynamo
Just a-twirlin' that pizza dough

The bar band there was hopping
I got lost in Rhonda's world
Redemption was the topping
As the pizza slowly twirled

They closed down the Sbarro's 'cross the railroad track
Ralph went out looking for pizza and never came back

Everybody knows a hungry Ralph

https://frinkiac.com/meme/S04E17/509675.jpg?b64lines=V2VsbCB0aGV5IGJsZXcgdXAgdGhlIApjaGlja2VuIG1hbiBpbiBQaGlsbHkgbGFzdCAKbmlnaHQKCgoKCgoKCi4uLm1tbW1tLi4uY2hpY2tlbi4uLg==

Meet me tonight at Panera Bread

no dude that's mark kozelek

his songs are even easier to parody because he pretty much writes them as parodies of their own style to begin with

I had to listen to "The Promise" earlier - Bruce's most self-referential song? That 2-disc lost album sort of thing they put out with the Darkness box is nice, but the 3 year gap (lawsuit-imposed?) between Born to Run and Darkness probably did him a lot of good in the long run.

IS THERE SEX IN THE CAAAAAARRRR?
YES THERE"S SEX IN THE CAAAAAARRRR!

That killed me because Bruce has never directly sang about sex, eh?

--

https://the-niche.blog/2018/04/16/the-top-ten-horniest-bruce-springsteen-songs/

On Badlands: "Any given lyric in this song could be about overthrowing American capitalism or getting gloriously, generously rawed. Or both!"

Because The Night Belongs To Fuckers

that list of horny springsteen songs is glaringly missing "candy's room."

and the ILM springsteen song is glaringly missing a river. or lake. or some body of water.

good point.

We kiss, my heart's pumpin' to my brain
And the blood rushes in my veins, the fire rushes towards the skies
I go driving, driving deep into the night
I go driving deep into the light, in Candy's eyes
...

i'm gonna take a shower

There's that song on "Devils & Dust" about a prostitute in Reno that's about as explicit as Bruce has ever gotten, or for that matter could be.

my. goodness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5PoIrcyd34

and the ILM springsteen song is glaringly missing a river. or lake. or some body of water.

It's also missing the part where he listens to the radio. We have so much work to do.

The buildup and release in the beginning of “somewhere in the night” was my first big OH WOW Bruce moment (outside of “tunnel of love” and certain BitUSA singles). Now I love all the classic stuff

By the moonlit lake, there's a teenage punk
Jackin' off into a ball cap which is full of spunk
Meanwhile a Chevy roars across the bridge over the river
And the old faded mine worker does some more damage to his liver

Willows weep and hangdogs creep like barflies crawling down the street
While the lights from the swamps glow bright with high pomp for the girls we're trying to meet
The wheels on the car spin fast to go far from the places we want to escape
But the draw of the dump smells strong of gas pumps and we all pass out from the heat

A+

"Pink Cadillac" also belongs on the list of horny songs. I love that Springsteen wrote a song about a black Cadillac and a song about a pink Cadillac, and the black Cadillac is a metaphor for death and the pink Cadillac is a metaphor for vaginas. That is some sophisticated symbolism right there.

I was thinking about adding a verse about driving Dow. To philly with a girl from basking ridge and stopping on the way to make it under the Trenton makes bridge.

I don't know, that sounds a bit too happy. Better throw in a state trooper or two.

Red Headed Woman from the Not Unplugged album is pretty frisky:

Listen up stud, your life's been wasted
till ya got down on your knees and tasted
a red headed woman, a red headed woman
it takes a red headed woman to get a dirty job done

Tight skirt, strawberry hair
tell me what you got baby waitin under there
big green eyes that look like, son
they can see every cheap thing that you've ever done

Well I don't know how many girls you dated man
but you ain't lived till you had your tires rotated
by a red headed woman, a red headed woman
it takes a red headed woman to get a dirty job done

That's one I always try to forget ever happened. Bruce in couch-jumping mode. I'm glad you enjoy going down on your wife, Bruce, but please stop writing songs about it.

"Secret Garden" is fairly explicit too - "she'll let you in her mouth/ if the words you say are right" - and I don't much like that one either. I feel like something happened to his way of writing about sex when he got married, where he's more explicit but also more self-conscious and awkward about it.

Speaking of horny Bruce, this performance of the e.street shuffle was a bit startling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81QcctmsodI

He's on Graham Norton, along with Robert DeNiro.

That's a chat show lineup!

Latest official live archive release is 10/23/99, in Los Angeles, a show that changed up a lot of the reunion set (for example, nothing from BitUSA!). I saw a chunk of reunion tours, and each time I remember telling the person I was with, man, he is so incredible it's hard to believe that in '98/'99 he was about 20 years past his '78 peak as a performer, when he was even better. And of course we are now another 20 years past him being 20 years past his peak ... and he was still pretty good on the 2016 tour!

Josh in Chicago, can you explain something to me? Why is it, exactly, that '78 is generally agreed to be his peak? I have only videos to go on, and I think his '78 performances are amazing, but I can't quite see what makes them so much better than the River tour or the Born in the USA tour.

smaller venues

It's a good question. Keeping in mind that he's really never been *bad*, and just about every show I've ever heard from, say, '74 to the Tunnel of Love Express tour (and beyond, tbh) has been pretty great, I'd say a few factors were at work. Yeah, smaller venues for sure, but Bruce also still had something to prove, at least to some degree. Born to Run made him a critic's darling, and the covers of Time and Newsweek introduced him to a wider audience, so expectations were pretty high. The tour also followed the infamous lawsuit that kept him out of the studio for a few years, time Bruce and the band (still probably breaking in new additions Max and Roy and, post-BtR, Steve) largely spent touring and woodshedding. When the suit was finally settled Bruce was at last free to record Darkness, whose sessions were fraught but whose material was A+, and also marked a shift to a more-direct sound, away from BtR's cinematic fanfares. Not only did all the live versions of songs like "Badlands" and "Prove It All Night" absolutely top their recorded counterparts, Bruce also had a pile of live-only sure-fires like "Fire" and "Because the Night" and even "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" that he busted out, plus the occasional early appearance of "River" songs like "Independence Day" and "Point Blank." And yet his well of songs was not yet so deep that you were still more or less guaranteed to hear many of your old favorites, and his shows were punctuated with some great storytelling, too, which he later had less room for.

So there's all that, imo. Then there was also the still somewhat novel proliferation of bootlegs, and shows like the Roxy, Passaic/Capital Theater and Winterland not only made the rounds, but Roxy and Winterland were so revered (and well recorded) they even made up a chunk of his official Live 1975-85 set (albeit sometimes in edited form). So between the live recordings official and otherwise, many of the shows on the '78 tour were essentially canonized as part of his catalog.

That show in the Darkness box is phenomenal. Love that recording of "The Ties That Bind," even though the intro is a little rocky. Did Bruce play much 12-string electric onstage other than that song/show?

There's not much footage of Bruce playing anything but a Tele on stage (as far as electrics go). There might be something I'm forgetting, but from memory the only other 12-string stuff from that "River" era is from some versions of "The Price You Pay" and the outtake "Loose Ends." Maybe he thought 12-string was a little on the nose?

In recent years it's usually Steve who gets the Rickenbacker or White Falcon or mandolin or whatever. Even Nils I want to say largely sticks with one guitar, his Jazzmaster, though he occasionally gets in some Dobro or lap steel.

Ok, thanks, that makes sense. It sounds like it's as much about the venues and the songs, and, like, the whole context of the tour as it is about the performances.

If someone showed up in a time machine today and offered me a ride to the Springsteen tour of my choice, I think I'd be pretty torn. I do love all the interplay with the audience in the '78 shows, and how the energy is so high but it all feels a little rough around the edges still. And it's great to see him all young and lithe, before he decided to encase himself in muscle. But so many of my favorite songs came a little later. Darkness is actually pretty low on my list of favorite Bruce albums, though I do think almost everything on it sounds better live.

Just listened to Wrecking Ball for the first time (I've been slooowly working my way through the post-Tunnel of Love stuff, in a very random order) and was surprised to find that I love the title track. It's way more affecting than a song about the demolition of a stadium has any right to be.

It could use a reservoir or tributary, otherwise solid B+

It has swamps, though, right in the first line!

that was the only thing keeping it from a B

Saw Western Stars yesterday, against my better judgment; I think this NPR review is otm.

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/24/771390026/springsteen-concert-film-western-stars-sheds-no-new-light

i knew i'd pass on this just from the way he was singing in the trailer.

So what to make of Western Stars, the new sight-track to his first record of all-new material since that [2009] knee slide?

Someone's feeling cheated that Wrecking Ball only had 10 brand new songs? Passing on this review too, lol.

Huh, didn't notice that. The rest of it is pretty much word-for-word what I would have said about the movie (the words "portentous" and "intoning platitudes" definitely flitted through my mind as I was watching.)

It's not the singing that's the problem, it's the talking.

haha. Did you like the Broadway special? I have to finish that sometime.

I liked the Broadway special and thought the memoir was great, but those were both pretty grounded in real stories about his life. This is him saying shit like "the car is a powerful metaphor," and "these are the things that grow your garden of love," while staring off into the distant desert and wearing a cowboy hat.

omg, in.

So it's Springsteen does Malick?

I mean... he thinks he's doing a lot of things? There's a credits sequence of a guy sweeping a floor for five minutes, so I guess he must be a big fan of the Twin Peaks revival.

But basically it's just some concerts that sound exactly like the album, strung together with these creaky, ponderous voiceovers where he tells you that family is good and lying is bad and you shouldn't run away from your problems. Over slo-mo shots of horses and clouds and whisky bottles and Cowboy Bruce sitting in cars and walking through the desert and staring hauntedly out of windows.

Cowboy Bruce sitting in cars

He's sitting in METAPHORS.