The Friday Morning Listen, Part II: Bruce Springsteen

First posted on Mark Is Cranky:

If you were hanging around this space last Friday, you would have seen three Blogcritics attempt to calmly report on their past and current relationships to Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run. The release of the 30th Anniversary edition has DJ Radiohead and myself somewhat bowled over. Heck, the DJ was so floored that he temporarily lost his ability to speak in complete sentences!

Over the weekend we had some time to muse on the extra content of the box set. That is, the DVD documentary on the making of Born To Run, "Wings For Wheels", and the stunning concert video DVD "Live at the Hammersmith Odeon, 1975".

Read on, as we make one last attempt to quell the madness in our souls.

My thanks to both Lisa McKay and DJ Radiohead for hurling themselves at this task with such verve and passion.

Hammersmith Odeon, London '75

Paid the cost to be the boss (Palladium 1976/N.Y.C.). Pièce de Résistance (Capital Theatre 1978/Passaic, NJ). Live at the Agora Ballroom (Cleveland, OH). Live at Alpine Valley. Fire on the Fingertips.

Bruce Springsteen bootleg records. Yes, back in that shadowy past we all 'stole' from Bruce. So desperate for live material, we just could not help ourselves. After reading so many articles about those legendary live performances, a person just felt empty.

Yes, that was me. Right up to The River tour, I was an E-Street concert virgin. It was so frustrating. The closest I came to attending a show was on the Darkness On The Edge Of Town tour. Springsteen was coming to the Augusta Civic Center (central Maine) but I couldn't go due to some kinda family activity conflict, like...my brother-in-law was flying in from Cleveland for a visit and he'd just had a vasectomy. Ouch. Gees, what a pathetic (and now I suppose, funny) excuse to miss a concert! Turns out that the show just added to the lore: four hours, Bruce and Clarence running through the arena and playing up in the balcony. Then there's the (perhaps apocryphal) story of the band taking the stage at a local bar, the Luna Base II, for a post-concert blowout. Y'know, you miss this stuff when you're seventeen and it feels like the world has just ended.

The drought may have ended for me 1980 but a legitimate live recording did not surface until the 1986 release of Live 1975-1985. Finally, some early concert recordings to allow the fans to revisit the pure joy of an E-Street show.

Now, with this 30th anniversary release, we have video proof of what the E-Street band was capable of back when Born To Run first exploded onto the scene. The legend of Springsteen's early band was well-deserved. From the sparse and emotional "Thunder Road" to the stretched-out "Kitty's Back" to the eruption of "She's The One" to the exhausting "Detroit Medley", that band took everything that was right (and righteous!) about rock & roll and pushed it to the extreme. Watching this concert is just way, way too much fun.

Wings For Wheels

This look at the making of Born To Run illustrates just how much pressure Bruce put on himself (and those around him) to be great. Aside from the pure fan voyeurism of witnessing things like Bruce conducting a Spanish-influenced alternate introduction to "Jungleland" or seeing Miami Steve smirk at the problem of spending six months on one song ("Born To Run", the single), what becomes apparent is this: everyone involved with this project began to get the idea that something very special was going on. Looking back at it now, Bruce confirms that the record is about friendship. To this day he appears to be grateful for the effort and dedication that his friends brought to bear.

What with all of the cynicism attached to the music industry these days, it was incredibly refreshing to watch so many people give their all for the sake of friendship and music.

Hats off to producer, director and editor Thom Zimmy. Fantastic stuff.

One more goodie: the documentary DVD contains three live tunes from a show played at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, 1973. A full band "Spirit In The Night", Bruce at the piano. An acoustic "Wild Billy's Circus Story". And last but certainly not least, a rockin' "Thundercrack". I wonder if back in 1973, Springsteen had any idea of what awaited him just a few years down the road.

It was a lot of fun reading Mark and Lisa's thoughts on Born to Run. I think one of the things I enjoyed the most is realizing how similar and yet how different our response and experience with this amazing album is.

I am probably going to get booed down by the two of them but I am apparently the baby of this discussion. I was not in college or grad school when Born to Run was released in 1975. I was in diapers. I was 2-years old (I am ducking as I type that). The Springsteen I grew up with was the Springsteen of Born in the U.S.A..

I discovered Born to Run at about the same age as Mark and Lisa did...college. I think that is no small part of the reason the responses of the three of us were so similar. The universal themes we discussed in Part 1 of this review are timeless and so is the album. The reason Bruce Springsteen still packs auditoriums and sells albums today is not nostalgia. He was thinking long haul from the word go. He wrote about important things at an early age and he never stopped. Incidentally, Born in the U.S.A. is now more than 20 years old. I listened to it today and while there are some very good songs on that album I am convinced it does not have the same life as Born to Run.

So let's talk about those extras...

It has been a bit of a frustrating time to be a music fan. The state of music today is so bad labels have been reduced to re-issuing great albums of the past in 'Deluxe' editions in order to generate some sales. The pisser in this equation is trying to find a way to get people who already bought the album once to buy it again while at the same time attracting folks who passed on the album the first time (or perhaps were in diapers at the time of its initial release). Plenty of these sets fail to deliver the kind of bonus material that will motivate fans to be gouged twice.

Born to Run is not one of them.

I do not mean to give short shrift to the Wings for Wheels documentary but the real treasure in this set is the Live at the Hammersmith-Odeon DVD. This is one of the very few vintage films of Bruce and the boys (back when it was just the boys) and it is stunning.

Springsteen did an interview on NPR's "Fresh Air" program in which he made mention of the band having a great group of songs to choose from each night when they were only three albums into their career. He is dead on! The set list is nearly perfect. The performances are inspired and inspiring. "Thunder Road" is not as rocking but it is every bit as dramatic here. "Lost in the Flood" is a show stopper and "She's the One" sounds even more like the Chuck Berry/Bo Diddley homage here than it does on the album the band were promoting that night. This performance is a rare treat. This is the sound of a band still on the rise in terms of their commercial appeal but reaching their peak as a live band and armed with an arsenal of songs with very few peers (and they were only three albums into their career!).

Watching these young Turks and hearing them perform at this level makes you incredibly thankful someone remembered to record this night in 1975. It makes you jealous of the ones who were in the room this night in 1975.

It makes you wish there was more of this band from this period but that passes quickly because this night and this DVD and this album are more than enough.

Well, I can't speak to the extras on this set, because I'm adhering to the rule we have in our house that you don't go out and buy yourself stuff this close to Christmas. And that's okay with me - I'm perfectly willing to wait another month to dig in, but my appetite is certainly whetted by everything I've heard about the Hammersmith footage - I can't wait to see that!

Mark, you spoke about the whole friendship angle that was apparent in the documentary footage. You certainly still get the feeling, watching them perform together now, that friendship is a key ingredient in the long-term success of the band, especially considering that everyone has side projects and 'outside lives'. One of the things I've long admired about Springsteen is the fact that he seems to have managed to survive mega-stardom without falling victim to too many of its trappings. He could have just as easily self-destructed in that spotlight glare or collapsed under the weight of his own mythology, but he seems to have succeeded in living his life with as much normalcy as possible under the circumstances, not a small thing in my opinion.

Hearing DJ talk about getting into Springsteen when he was in college, some sixteen years after Born to Run (if I'm calculating correctly), really does speak to the timelessness and universality of this music. The audiences that you find at a Springsteen show today run the gamut from the original fans who are now in their 50s and are showing up with kids and grandkids in tow, to young people in their late 'teens and early 20s. It's a pretty eclectic mix, and the shows are as powerful as they ever were, although perhaps in a slightly different way, as even the Boss yields a point or two to middle age. What I've taken away from this conversation that we've had is that there is some music that transcends time and place because it touches those parts of the human spirit that we all recognize, and speaks to the things that we often can't articulate but that we all yearn for - that's the music that's destined to live forever.

Article Author: Mark Saleski

Mark Saleski is a writer and music obsessive based out of the Monadnock region of New Hampshire. He has contributed to Jazz.com and also writes reviews for Blogcritics.org. He produces the weekly feature The Friday Morning Listen. …

Visit Mark Saleski's author page — Mark Saleski's Blog