27. Incident On 57th Street / Rosalita / New York City Serenade – Bruce Springsteen
I was recently tipped off by a friend that Springsteen was making most of his current run of shows available as official bootlegs for the princely sum of £6. Given that most of his current shows are running to three hours or more that’s a pretty fair deal. At a point in his career when he could be forgiven for slowing down, or even stopping following the deaths of Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons, Springsteen seems as alive, more alive maybe, than he has in the last twenty years. The loss of Federici and Clemons has prompted a shuffling of the E Street Band’s line up, its ranks swelling with the addition of a full horn complement, string section on many dates, and Tom Morello from Rage Against The Machine on guitar – as if Nils Lofgren, Steve Van Zandt, and Springsteen himself isn’t a stellar enough line up already. The current band is phenomenal. Of course, it always was.
The Brisbane show on the current tour features a complete run through of “The Wild, The Innocent & The E-Street Shuffle”, Springsteen’s second record, and the one that prefaced his eventual break through with “Born To Run”. I am a massive fan of that album and it contains my favourite run of three songs straight on any record: the whole of side two covering “Incident On 57th Street”, through “Rosalita” and finishing with “New York City Serenade”. None of the songs clocking in beneath seven minutes but none of them outstaying their welcome. Springsteen was never this – excuse the obvious lift – wild again, rushing headlong into a myriad of musical ideas, embracing styles, trying anything and everything (virtually all of it working). All he learned gigging the Jersey shore is here. All his influences sucked in – Dylan, Van Morrison, jazz, latin, R&B, gospel, straight up rock and roll – and spat back out across three songs that are almost heroic in their ambition and scope. There is more invention here than most artists achieve in their lives; Springsteen crammed it into twenty four minutes.
I adore “Wild, Innocent…” for its sheer hubris. It’s a young man’s record, before age and experience reins in some of its excess. Ten minute jazz rock work out ? Yeah, why shouldn’t I do that ? “West Side Story” ? I could reimagine that. If I’m going to serenade New York then why not nod back to Gershwin with a dramatic, classical piano intro ? All of this, eventually, was tightened up, compressed and finessed, onto the record that became “Born To Run”, every note worked and worked until it was perfect, but I don’t think he could have gotten there without stretching out on the sprawling “Wild, Innocent…” first.
So, for me, the Brisbane show is telling. A much older man revisiting a young man’s record and, arguably, his most diverse record musically. For the most part it’s a pretty straight run, not quite a direct recreation of the album but not far off (which, don’t get me wrong, takes some serious chops to pull off). Then, towards the end of “Incident On 57th Street”, Springsteen launches into the climactic solo and something magical happens. It begins in very similar style to the record but then he finds a gorgeous new sequence, a series of intricate, melodic runs that aren’t there in 1973. It’s a really small moment but it lifts the whole run through of the album for me, beautiful evidence that his creative spark is still firing forty years later. Not for the first time he moved me to tears – happy tears – when I heard it. It’s like a thirty second salvo against fading away into old age, not just because technically and physically it’s a pretty astonishing piece to play, but because he’s still finding new things and creating new moments.
It’s a measure of my love and admiration for Springsteen that I believe I could run a list of songs, in parallel to this one, filled entirely with 42 of his records. Perhaps that’s an idea for another time. He deals in songs of joy, songs of pain, songs that demand you get up and dance, songs that ask you to sit down and reflect. There’s shade and light and tears and smiles. Fear, hope, truth, anger, remorse. And redemption. Almost always redemption.
In short all human experience and life is here. All of my life is here. It’s no accident that last year Springsteen inspired a documentary film – “Springsteen & I” – which specifically deals with people’s – his fans’ – relationship to his music. If his music touches you (and I accept that he’s an artist that doesn’t resonate for everyone) then he connects in a way unlike anyone else currently working, arguably ever working, in rock music. I use “rock” music as lazy shorthand for the eclectic stew of rock, pop, jazz, latin, soul, folk, country, blues, hell-pretty-much-whatever, that characterises his songs over the past forty or so years. I’d originally written some of this post immediately after the Dylan one (here) as there’s common ground between the two and Dylan was a hugely important influence on Springsteen. I buy the argument that without Dylan there would be no Springsteen, certainly not as we know him, but I don’t buy the argument that Dylan is the greater artist (in so much as I buy that any artist is “greater” than another, it’s not really a competition). The fundamental difference between them I think is that Dylan has no interest in being understood whereas everything Springsteen does is about making a connection, about finding a way for the themes in his songs to be recognised.
So here’s what I take from those three songs now: the willful naivety of youth and its capacity to get stuff done, just for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and the fact that age and experience needn’t deaden that capacity. Play them and walk tall.
……
This post ended up being a little light on Rosalita – officially the most fun you can have listening to a song ever – and New York City Serenade. I doubt I’d do them justice so here’s some links to just go listen to them:
Roaslita from 1978 (I think it’s ’78 anyway)
42 @ 42 