An old friend from Montana days queried me the other night as to my overall take on Bruce Springsteen, in light of Da Boss’ brand new LP, Wrecking Ball.
Here’s my reply:
Bruce is a far more interesting case than one would ever surmise from reading his press of the past 30 years, or hearing the precious few songs that still get played to death on "Classic Rock" FM!
And a generally misunderstood artist, overall, particularly in terms of his truest strengths (humor, singing, and lead guitar playing!), which he and his manager, ex-ROLLING STONE kingpin Jon Landau, have done their best to camouflage, in search of some kinda neo-Woody Guthrie/Pete Seeger/Bob Dylan "Universality" and continuing pop chart/stadium concert/box set reissue relevance.
I first heard about Bruce sometime after he was on the covers of TIME & NEWSWEEK in late-1975, but first actually listened to one of his albums while on vacation in Aurora, Minnesota in August 1978 (their public library happened to boast a copy of BORN TO RUN). When I got back to Havre, Montana I also heard his then-recent album, DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN, which remains my clear favorite, mainly due to the hard edge of its singing and guitar playing, which he’s never matched on record.
The critical consensus, which has been ALL OVER the place through the decades, but mostly aligned with BORN TO RUN (somewhat understandably), has finally begun to swing my way in the wake of the mega-deluxe 3cd + 3dvd DARKNESS reissue from late-2010!
I consider Bruce a great (if limited and slightly anachronistic) artist, and largely undiminished as a performer, however much his post-1987 records haven’t matched those he released up ’til then.
He served a full six-year apprenticeship in various journeymen-going-nowhere bar bands along the Jersey shore from 1966-72, until he was "discovered" (as had been Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan & Aretha Franklin before him!) by the legendary A & R executive, John Hammond of Columbia Records.
Early on, Columbia couldn’t figure out how to market Bruce, so they had him record his debut as a sorta post-folkie, too-jokey, Jersey Gypsy singer-songwriter, in an attempt to make him the definitive "New Dylan", even though he’d always played his thoroughbred rock and roll with full bands.
GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK, NJ boasts a handful of truly classic songs, but I’ve never much cared for the record itself, as it simply doesn’t represent him (or its own best material) very well. It’s just too thin and hokey sounding, above all. And it contains a few songs (tracks 3 through 5 on the cd version, i.e. “Mary Queen of Arkansas”, “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street”, and “Lost in the Flood”) that verge on the downright embarrassing!
Regardless, it didn’t sell.
And neither did the much-improved sophomore effort, THE WILD, THE INNOCENT, AND THE E STREET SHUFFLE, which at least featured his actual band. I’m not crazy about the slightly too-precious, local Jersey mythos songs on side one, though they’re all pretty good, I suppose (especially in subsequent live iterations), but I still consider the three-song, segued "suite" on side two ("Incident on 57th Street"/"Rosalita"/"New York City Serenade") the finest and most-intensely-listenable side of any of his records!
Magical and hilarious, at least heard all together. In that period Bruce even had a female violinist in his band (Suki Lahav), not to forget Jazz pianist David Sancious!
Clearly he was on his way….
BORN TO RUN was both “a last-ditch power drive”, and a desperate attempt to avoid getting dropped (!) by the label. However overblown it was/is production-wise (totally in thrall to Phil Spector, he spent a year in the studio on "Born to Run" the song, with nothing else to show for Columbia’s investment!), it remains a near-flawless set of wonderfully-conjoined songs and mythic storytelling.
Luckily for Bruce, it worked, and he was suddenly a star of sorts, though not so much out in the boondocks where we all lived.
I’m guessing that my best friend’s Havre High ’77 classmate Ron Elliott was all over Bruce from that moment on, if not before, as I’ve read something to that effect in an old issue of THE HAVRE HIGH STAMPEDE, in which Ron extolled his other faves of the day, which included Little Feat (!) and Todd Rundgren (!!), in addition to The Boss.
It wasn’t ’til he got to Annapolis, Maryland that the Punk bug hit him, when The Clash played there (!) on their GIVE ‘EM ENOUGH ROPE tour. Sadly, Ron never seemed able to convince his ol’ pals back in Havre that there was "a new sheriff in town", as Shannen Doherty later put it in the immortal HEATHERS! LOL
Meantime, Bruce got embroiled in an infamous lawsuit with his original manager/producer, famed Partridge Family songsmith, Mike Appel, who’d been nudged out by Jon Landau during the recording of BORN TO RUN, and so was legally forbidden to record his next album for more than two years while that got sorted out, eventually more or less in Bruce’s favor.
It’s a terrible shame he lost all that time, as there would likely otherwise be at least one more Great Bruce Album from his true prime, as the recent 2cd compilation THE PROMISE demonstrates quite definitively.
DARKNESS didn’t sell quite as well as BTR (though it went Top 10), but the accompanying tour remains the live benchmark for The Bruce Cult (and yours truly), and deservedly so, with bootlegs aplenty demonstrating his incendiary guitar playing and a near-perfect three-hour set list.
I’m especially fond of "Adam Raised a Cain" and "Streets of Fire", where you hear a fantastic desperation in Bruce’s singing matched by a piercing guitar tone he’s virtually never permitted on his studio records again, but the entire album is choice, if admittedly grim, stuff!
In late 1980 THE RIVER gave Bruce his first #1 album and Top 10 single ("Hungry Heart"), but the double album wears me out—too many of its songs seem like backward-looking genre exercises (whether Faux Girl Group, Gearhead Bonding Exercise, Good Timey Rock ‘n’ Roll—in sum, "More Songs About Cars and Janey", as I said about it at the time!).
THE RIVER also featured too many attempts at The Big Working Class Baby Boomer Sociological Statement. I like it fine, but it’s not something I play for pleasure, that’s for sure.
When Bruce couldn’t figure out how to teach The E Street boize his quiet, very personal new songs in 1982, he finally decided to put out the largely-acoustic, original home 4-track cassette demos as NEBRASKA, in what remains one of the few truly big risks he’s ever taken.
Though I’ve always found the album kinda one-dimensional (no shit!), and a few of its songs seem pretty slight, I definitely admire it, and its own sub-cult considers it his peak.
Of course it’s considered practically a Holy Object by the subsequent Alt Country/Americana crowd, perhaps because none of them has ever made a record even that good, so I try not to hold a grudge against NEBRASKA itself!
Anyhow, a lot of the songs that were eventually on BORN IN THE USA emerged during the making of NEBRASKA or just after, and I think Bruce realized he needed to make his music a bit more celebratory sounding if he really wanted to reach the Mass Audience that Landau and their flack Dave Marsh (an early linchpin critic at both CREEM & ROLLING STONE who’d by then made his first big batch of money by penning the first major Bruce bio, and who’d eventually run screaming from his original enthusiasms for such pre-Bruce hard rock immortals as The Doors, The Stooges, Alice Cooper and The New York Dolls, once he’d anointed Bruce Our Rock and Roll Messiah) had always imagined for their boy.
I was frankly quite thrilled by BORN IN THE USA when it appeared in June 1984, as it contained such a broad range of songs, and leavened the grim everyday loser stuff with the first true wit that Bruce had evinced since his second album, by then over a decade old!
The Big, Glossy Eighties Production may seem a bit dated now, but then what major label album of that time doesn’t? I quite like everything on the record, and am equally fond of several of the non-LP b-sides that eventually emerged on its SEVEN Top 10 singles! There are even a few more or less "undiscovered" classics from that period, particularly "I’m Goin’ Down", "Downbound Train", and "Pink Cadillac", the hilarious b-side of "Dancing in the Dark"!
I mean, sure it got played to death, as did its great doppelganger, Prince’s PURPLE RAIN, which I also no longer play for pleasure, but Bruce’s was the (even) better album in that instance. And the humor quotient definitely saved it, as did the Grand Canyon Drum Sound and the title song, which was a pretty goddamned withering account of the Vietnam Vet circumstance, and a great lead-off track.
At 30 million units shifted, I’d guess BITUSA outsold the previous six Springsteen albums put together, but that’s no fault of the album itself, just the way the Biz cookie crumbled.
To his credit, Bruce has never tried to produce another across the board mega-hit, though no one ever truly follows up a Pop Culture "comet" like that, as Michael Jackson, Prince, Guns n’ Roses and Pearl Jam have also subsequently demonstrated.
The ensuing 5LP live box set was a one-week wonder in the music biz, which is why they can’t even GIVE away copies of it anymore, but that too is a fine, intensely-listenable piece of work, as I wrote in THE MONTANA KAIMIN at the time, in a piece I called "Let Brucemania Reign!"
By the by, the 1978 songs/recordings are by far the highlight of the whole thang, just in case you ever feel like giving it a spin. The definitively fire-breathing "Adam Raised a Cain" resides there!
Bruce surely knew he’d never sell so many records again, so he didn’t worry much about the spare, downcast simplicity of 1987’s TUNNEL OF LOVE, which is nearly as moving and enduring a record about a marriage falling apart as Bob Dylan’s BLOOD ON THE TRACKS (!), and which I definitely play more often than THE RIVER, NEBRASKA & BORN IN THE USA put together!
"One Step Up" remains one of the wisest songs I’ve ever heard about a guy in the midst of relationship problems, and proved The Boss could deploy a synthesizer as deftly as his famed Fender Telecaster!
And both “Brilliant Disguise” and the title track were dark hit singles that didn’t back away from guilt, complexity, or failure. I’m just sorry that all three of those exquisite songs have been more or less written out of Classic Rock’s version of Bruce History.
Alas, that’s the last time I truly, deeply, madly cared about a new Springsteen record, although he’s kinda returned to form post-9/11. I just don’t think he’s added more than two or three songs to his 50 best since 1987, and until he puts at least that many on a single album again, I’m just gonna listen a few times and then file ’em away! LOL
Now, to return (at long last!) to your specific queries: Yes, Bruce was a regular performer at the circa 1972-73 Max’s Kansas City. In fact, I believe he opened for Suicide at some point, which is almost certainly where Da Future Boss acquired their singer Alan Vega’s black leather, shades & beret look, which both favored during the bulk of the Seventies, not to mention a few of his ideas about how to deploy keyboards, I swear!
I feel pretty certain that Alan "Suicide", as he was known in the early-Seventies, adopted that look first, and I assume Bruce (among others!) dug it and perhaps even semi-unconsciously adapted it for himself. I suspect The Ramones were also well aware of Suicide, given that Alan Vega and keyboardist Martin Rev started playing various Manhattan dives together as early as 1971 (exactly contemporaneous with The New York Dolls, and about three years prior to Da Ramones), though the extremity of their sound and stance prevented them from releasing an album until 1977, when The Dolls’ ex-manager, Marty Thau, put out their immortal SUICIDE on his Red Star Records label!
By the way, here are representative shots of period-appropriate, leather jacketed/beret-clad Alan Vega (with Suicide bandmate Martin Rev) & Da Boss:
Bruce actually played Suicide’s hauntingly anthemic "Dream Baby Dream" SOLO, as an encore, throughout his 2005 tour!
And the original:
Bruce also played with Bob Marley & The Wailers (!) at Max Kansas City on their first tour of America in 1973! The Wailers opened, but the event was considered so insignificant that a review of the show was rejected by the music editor of THE VILLAGE VOICE, in those pre-Robert Christgau days!
http://www.bobmarleymagazine.com/2010/12/marleyspringsteen-at-maxs-kansas-city-part-3/
All told, it’s pretty clear that Bruce is a lot hipper than one might imagine, however stodgy his Good Ol’ Rock & Roll (or, more recently, his over-earnest Folkie) orientation can seem at times.
Re: your colleague’s breakdown of the Bruce LPs, I don’t particularly concur, though he’s certainly not wrong to like the (pre-BORN IN THE USA) albums he does. Here’s how I’d shake ’em out, pre-1990s, using the famous Christgau letter grading scale:
A-Plus:
DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN (1978)
A:
BORN IN THE USA (1984); BORN TO RUN (1975)
High A-Minus:
TUNNEL OF LOVE (1987); THE WILD, THE INNOCENT, AND THE E STREET SHUFFLE (1973)
A-Minus:
NEBRASKA (1982); LIVE/1975-85 (5LP box set, 1986)
B-Plus:
THE RIVER (2LP, 1980); GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK, NJ (1973)
Re: Robert Christgau’s and Dave Marsh’s takes on the recordings, their views are somewhat in opposition, though not entirely:
Xgau’s are here: http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist2.php?id=199
If you can find either of the two original ROLLING STONE RECORD GUIDES (red cover: 1979; blue cover: 1983), that’ll provide a fine sampling of Marsh’s oft-embarrassingly-rapturous notices.
By the by, I have a 1987 "Critic’s Choice" book in which DM names DARKNESS as his 5th favorite album of all-time (the sole Bruce title he includes in his Top 10), though the 1983 RS guide gives it only 4 stars, while granting 5 stars apiece to BORN TO RUN, THE RIVER & NEBRASKA!
DARKNESS had previously received 5 stars in the 1979 guide, as had BORN TO RUN.
Big Dave also named BORN TO RUN his favorite album of all-time in the previous 1978 "Critic’s Choice" poll, so who the fuck knows what he REALLY thinks, especially 25 years further on! LOL
Christgau gave BORN IN THE USA an A-Plus, BORN TO RUN & TUNNEL OF LOVE A’s, and DARKNESS a B-Plus, after originally granting it an A-Minus in 1978, so he’s not really any more helpful in sorting things out, although his reviews seem notably less delusional than Marsh’s, naturally.
Although I do own nearly all of Bruce’s latterday recordings (or have given them as gifts to my mom), I don’t listen much, and have no stomach to determine my precise feelings about all of them at the moment.
But your buddy’s quite mistaken to declare ’em all to be "crap", particularly taking into account his stated fondness for the wildly uneven GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK & THE RIVER.
If I had to pick one post-TUNNEL album off the top of my head for you to try, I’d recommend 2007’s very accessible MAGIC, which kicks off with a classic single called "Radio Nowhere", certainly as immediately compelling a track as anything he’s released since 1984!
Bruce remains a great singer, and I’m not convinced that the inevitable deepening of his already-hoarse-in-the-Seventies voice hasn’t actually HELPED in certain respects!
One more thing: I’ve never for a moment bought into The Cult of Duration that worships the sheer LENGTH of Bruce’s justly famous concerts. Two hours seems like plenty to me, particularly in an arena or stadium, so the three- and four-hour specials of legend seem more like assignments to be endured than "dreams come true"! LOL
In the Live Rock Marathon Sweepstakes I’ll certainly take The Boss over The Dead, but that’s really not saying a lot. Of course if I could time travel back to 1978, no amount of time would seem onerous, but that was a brief peak, as most are, and my love for feedback-drenched electric guitar interplay is well-satisfied by the bootlegs I have and the modest number of such tracks included in the LIVE 1975-85 box.
An hour of Peak Television, Stooges, Sex Pistols, Clash, PiL, Joy Division, Gang of Four, Husker Du or Nirvana still DWARFS Bruce’s Retro Rock for me!
As do the seventy-five minutes and two hours-plus, respectively, of Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s LIVE RUST (1979) and WELD (1991), if we’re going to talk about Great Rock Traditionalists in concert!
Neil does a lot more for me than Bruce live (and in general), as do The Stones at their occasional best, even NOW!
Anyway, I hope this very long reply will both entertain and enlighten, my friend, at least regarding my own take on Our Bruce.
– Tom Kipp
