Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

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.

Meta-Ford

SEX IN MY CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRR

Now, that would have livened up the movie.

Don't you mean SEX IN MY METAPHOOOOOOOORRRR?

sometimes the car is a metaphor for the metaphorical

He drives an El Camino, so is it Sex In A Car, Sex In A Truck, or Sex In A Way Of Life?

Sex in a Lonely Waystation on the Dusty Road to Enlightenment. But only if we expand the definition of "sex" to include "your wife laying her weathered hand gently over yours as you hold the steering wheel."

As long as the road leads to redemption, or to transcendence, or to forgiveness. Otherwise it's just driving somewhere.

when is driving somewhere *ever* just driving somewhere?

As long as the road leads to redemption, or to transcendence, or to forgiveness. Otherwise it's just driving somewhere.

Pretty sure Bruce actually says this somewhere in the movie. I think the actual wording was something like, "But are we moving forward? Or are we just -" [long, meaningful pause] "MOVING?"

“The highway is alive tonight / But it ain’t kidding nobody about where it goes”

Washington Post movie critic talked to Bruce about Western Stars movie and about Bruce's interest in movies. https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/10/17/forget-rock-star-was-bruce-springsteen-born-be-filmmaker/?arc404=true

“When I wrote ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Darkness,’ I saw them as B-pictures,” Springsteen says. “If they worked really well, they were good ones, and the songs I was unhappy with were bad ones.”

He wanted both records “to have the breadth of cinema,” he says, “while at the same time remaining very, very personal for me. Those were the parameters of what I was imagining at that particular moment. I was sort of using the contours and the shape of films and movies, while at the same time trying to find myself in my work. But the film-ness of my songs was never far from my mind.”...“It was just how you processed everything,” he continues. “As a teenager, you were looking for a dramatic life. Where is my dramatic life? As if things weren’t dramatic enough. And you were writing your own script in your head as you walked down the street. It was all just part of living at that time.”

Eventually, Springsteen formed his own canon of go-to movies, each of which has had an imprint on his records — Ford’s ambivalent Western epic “The Searchers,” noir classics “The Night of the Hunter” and “Out of the Past,” Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver.”

also from that Washington Post article:

In the 1992 single “Better Days,” Springsteen sang about being “a rich man in a poor man’s shirt.” Today, in addition to the sprawling horse farm in New Jersey, he owns homes in Florida and Los Angeles, but still convincingly radiates man-of-the-people modesty, a contradiction he deflects by being the first person to call it an act. (“I made everything up!” he says at one point. “It’s a fascinating magic trick.”) Springsteen admits that he continues to find the notion of authenticity elusive, “knowing what a self-creation I was, and to some degree still am. But the strange thing of it all is that if you do it long enough, you start to become the thing that you pretended to be.”

I had no idea the movie was a movie-movie, theatrical. It just seems like such a misbegotten idea, a ruminative glimpse of his private life coming immediately on the the heels of his Broadway show (also a ruminative glimpse of his private life), which came right on the heals of his autobiography (another ruminative glimpse of his private life) tied to a modest but hardly superlative singer-songwriter record he's not supporting on the road. Having not seen said movie, it really seems like the sort of glorified EPK that should have come packaged with the deluxe edition of the album itself, sort of like those ... similarly ruminative docs including in the Born to Run, Darkness and River boxed sets.

such a misbegotten idea

the opening weekend box office agrees with you. i really liked the performances, even if bruce's voice seems a bit weathered for most of 'em. i walked out liking more songs from the album than i did walking in (and i quite like the album). the vignettes were like the broadway show without the humor. a lot of brucesplaining songs that already pretty much brucesplain themselves. i liked that patti got a lot of the spotlight. she and he sound really good together, which they did not on broadway.

record he's not supporting on the road

that's one of his stated reasons for making the movie, for what it's worth.

I did know that, but I guess it never really sank in that this is actually the first time he has not toured a record. Had he not just released the Broadway show on Netflix and flooded the up-close-with-Bruce market, I suppose something like this movie would have been a smart Netflix release instead.

so did anyone see that movie Blinded By the Light? Released too close to that Yesterday movie?

What are we going to see in Bruce's inevitable biopic?

Cars.

...and material re: sex in

a lot of brucesplaining songs that already pretty much brucesplain themselves.

Yeah, this was really my main complaint. Bruce's songs so often have a central message or argument or moral that can be summed up in words, and I've always felt that was a bit of a weakness on its own. And this entire album already seemed to me to have a really obvious moral, so that while I liked some of the songs just fine, I also felt like I was being repeatedly bludgeoned by a Victorian cautionary tale about how not to live your life. So the last thing I needed was Bruce carefully explaining the moral of each song in between performances.

The vagueness of it bothered me too. I liked the vignette that introduced Sundown, where he told a story about going out to California for the first time because he'd just been dumped, but the rest was really - not anchored by anything specific. I assume that's because the subtext of this album is his marriage, and he doesn't want to give any details about that, but all this vaguebooking just kind of misses what made the Broadway show and the book so good.

i walked out liking more songs from the album than i did walking in

So did I, actually - "Chasing Wild Horses" in particular. Yours was a much more measured and thoughtful response to the movie than mine.

“Straight Time” on Tom Joad is pretty slept-on. Pitch black. Thought if it with the time change and “darkness before dinner comes / Sometimes I can feel the itch.”

That's a good one. I think I like all of Bruce's songs about being tempted away from a happy marriage by the call of Something Else.

The Tom Joad song that really gets to me, though, is Highway 29. It makes me feel all cold inside.

A review at the time mentioned it, but the Tom Joad characters often end up dying or falling asleep or just in some floating state between the two by the song’s end.

Just listened to "Straight Time" again; I agree it's very good. Hadn't thought about the ending much, but there's something so haunting about that last line, that false sense of escape. Reminds me, in a way, of the end of Child Bride, which might be my favorite Dark Bruce song. "I imagine I put on my jacket/go down to a little roadside bar/pick a stranger and spin around the dance floor/ to a Mexican guitar."

oh and speaking of straight time, there's an article in the Nation about Springsteen as queer icon:
https://www.thenation.com/article/bruce-springsteen-queerness-essay/

highway 29 is a masterpiece