Re: Bruce Springsteen - Live In Dublin
Date: May 31, 2007 01:06
Duane in Houston Wrote:
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> "Devil's and Dust" !!! There's another one that'll
> grow mold next to "Tom Joad". What a piece of
> self-indulgant @#*x. He must have one HELL of a
> recording contract!
Actually, you've got that all wrong, Duane. You see Tom Joad effectively rescued Bruce's career from the doldrums after the post-divorce/remarriage/fatherhood/mid-life crisis that was the Human Touch/Lucky Town/Fake Band era. That alienated not just the fairweather fistpumpers who'd jumped on the Born In The USA bandwagon, but a lot of his hardcore constituency as well.
Tom Joad and especially the tour helped Bruce reconnect with his songs, his muse and his core audience. You may hate the album and tour, but I and practically everyone who saw those shows loved them. There were some breathtaking moments, like how he reworked The Promised Land into a very eerie dirge, which reinvented the song completely. He even rescued If I Should Fall Behind from Lucky Town purgatory and gave it a stripped down, soulful reading which brought out the song's fragile beauty. You really would have to be a very one-dimensional Bruce fan not to appreciate that.
Devils & Dust is, in my opinion, the best album Bruce has released since Tunnel of Love, and the tour took the Joad experiments even further. The finale - a cover of Suicide's Dream Baby Dream - was downright moving.
This is a road he wanted to go down after Nebraska. He was going to shelve the Born in the USA material indefinitely and release another acoustic/solo album he cut in LA in 1983. Landau talked him out of it - and quite wisely at that stage of his career. I'm not a big fan of Born in the USA - overproduced and full of mostly empty songs - but it was completely necessary because its success freed him up to follow his muse.
Bruce is now at a similar stage Neil Young reached in the early 80s. He did, on balance, a rock album, then a country-ish one, every other year. Then he signed to Geffen and made a lot of difficult, challenging, experimental records, some of which bore no resemblance to anything he'd done before or after. Love 'em or loathe 'em, they were fascinating failures (except for Everybody's Rockin', which was an expensive joke). I look forward to Bruce's shelved hip hop album in the near future.
Hey, Duane, maybe you and me can go see the Fiddy Springsteen Pimp My Rock tour when it his Houston and breakdance to the hip hop version of Jungleland.