To me, this show was just a kind of live promotional music video for the upcoming tour - it was barely a taste. Arguably, they should play the Super Bowl at halftime of a Springsteen concert next time to get the proportions right.
I was raised in the town next door to Freehold NJ, which shares a HS District with Freehold. Best friend’s older brother (much older to us at the time) was in the same class as Bruce. Bruce and I share a birthday. My first summer of work as a junior high school kid spent commuting to the songs of Born to Run on WNEW before Time/Newsweek. Been to countless shows. Waited overnight for tickets back in the day, for the River tour, with a total stranger, some guy who called me up on my college radio show and said he heard tickets were going on sale (unannounced!) tomorrow morning - I got off air 1AM, I told him come over and let’s go be first in line. He did, and we were. Got laid the first umpteen times during that run at the old Capital Center. I hear somgs with place names and they are songs about home - you hear Born to Run as an anthem, I remember Route 9 as a local road, and the Palace as that place we used to go to ride the rides endlessly on a roll of tickets we got for free because my father must have done some work for the guy that owned it.
Most of the time in my car these days, Sirius is tuned to E Street Radio, so I have had a chance to hear a lot of concerts in the last year or so. so many different styles, even for the same songs over the years. So much growth, even starting from a fantastic foundation, as an artist. Never a dull moment, although I confess surprise to learn that not every single show has been a 3.5-4 hour affair with no intermission. some of them are barely 3 hours!
As someone mentioned upthread, Springsteen’s main heritage is thru Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. Even his rock socks are folk songs at best. I really believe that 100 years from now, his songs will be remembered and studied for their reflection of what they said about individuals and America in his time. None of the 3 have great voices, but they do represent American music and the American spirit in its glory and grit at its best
My favorite show I have heard? There was a benefit at Count Basie Theater once, not so many years ago I think (another place my father did some work for many years after the Palace, he used to have a shop around the corner from there). I happened to be on a long drive from San Jose to halfway past the middle of nowhere in the Central Valley where I live now, when Bruce introduced the beginning of the show saying 2 minutes ago he told the band they were not going to do the show they planned, but since this place was special to him, and he had the idea to do something they never did before and they will almost certainly never do again.
My ears perked up.
The band then ripped into an unprecedented (and as far as I know never repeated) performance of both Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town like no others.
Not the songs.
The albums.
In order.
No filler, no breaks (except the intermission between the albums, presumably some money was raised then).
If I remember right, no encore either.
Highly recommended if you can find it!
What did I think of yesterday’s performance?
Voice didn’t bother me, it is how it is, and that is how it has always been.
My girlfriend, who has none of the background listed above, has learned to listen along, and really enjoys all the versions of 10th Avenue Freezeout we hear on the Sirius concerts. From the first note, I recognized the song of course and told her it was her favorite song. It took her a bit to catch on but then she squealed like a schoolgirl, and it took me back to those Cap Center shows so long ago for just a second. You can’t put a price on that!
But the aging of everyone, so apparent on the large HD screen, reflected a little bit more mortality then I felt like seeing just then and there. Just now, my Pandora station played Complete Control by The Clash, and I was reminded of another songwriter I would compare more favorably with Springsteen than Segar - Joe Strummer.
Both are incisive politically, far more then you might expect from their upbringing. Willing to experiment with musical styles regardless of risk to the fan base. I recently saw a couple of documentaries about Strummer via netflix. More of a tortured soul then Springsteen and died young (but not from abuse and partying, apparently from an undiagnosed congenital heart issue). Both struck me as extremely contented men in their 50s still doing some of their best work, even though as young men they were, well, let’s say, less then content, and extremely angry. The power of Darkness as an album in its anger and fury at personal angst - Ian Curtis, Trent Reznor, and the like have nothing on Bruce - been there, done that, came out alive and thriving and so can you, and that is the overall theme and power of the music. Right there for all to see at halftime in the Super Bowl.
But to be fair, our host, who was more demographically aligned with Jennifer Hudson, wept at her Star Spangled Banner performance (did I mention I was born in Baltimore where that song was written, and that it is not a hymn but more of a hubristic boast?) but slept through the Boss. She is competing a move though, she needed the rest, and all was left were the couches and the TV.
I don’t pretend Springsteen is pop music for everyone - it continues to amaze me how something so local at its heart to me is experienced by so many from other places, to be frank - but when the history of American music is written, there will be a chapter for Bruce Springsteen when everyone else from our era is forgotten. Not because the music is a best seller (it is not always so) but because it speaks to us in some quintessentially American way.
