So: Springsteen last night in Asbury Park.
It was the first time in my “career” as a fan that I occasionally questioned whether he knew what he was doing on stage. There were some treee-mendous moments but if it weren’t for the venue, it would’ve been only slightly north of okay.
The big problem: the song selection and pacing made no sense at all. Nothing fit. Worse, he’s locked himself into way too many stand-bys. I’m on record as a sans-sarcasm believer that No Surrender and The Promised Land rank right up there with Citizen Kane and Michelangelo’s David among the great cultural creations of western civilization, but they desperately need a rest.
Maybe this is necessary - the only way he’ll be able to protect some of the clunky new songs is to barricade them between the likes of Out In The Street and Waiting On A Sunny Day - but it sure doesn’t make for any kind of thematically coherent set. Say what you want about some of those every-night blocks on tours past (everything from Stolen Car/Wreck On The Highway/Point Blank in ‘80 to Devil’s Arcade/Rising/Last To Die/Long Walk Home in ‘07), but at least Bruce attempted to articulate a theme and/or vision. There was only one stretch last night that worked in that regard.
This tour is meat if he doesn’t work on the pacing. I don’t even want to think of how arena audiences, wearing their well-ironed Levi jeans and snapping tens of photos with their BlackBerry phones, will react to a five-pack of Working On A Dream/Seeds/Johnny 99/The Ghost Of Tom Joad/Good Eye. That’s not just a bathroom break for most casual fans; that’s a bathroom break, a leisurely stroll around the arena concourse, a call home to the baby-sitter, a full beer sipped slowly while engaging in casual conversation about AIG, and a second visit to the can.
The good: The recession suite of Seeds/Johnny 99 (full band)/Joad (loud guitar version) was as intense a three-pack as anything I’ve seen him do in a while. Thematic connections are good - to sell this one to the crowd, all you need to do is bookend it with The River and maybe something like Cover Me or Downbound Train… Much better sound system than on past tours. The audio was crisp and clear in a venue that usually sounds like the interior of my small intestine… The new material came across much, much, much, much, much better live than it does on the record, especially Kingdom of Days (just beautiful with the new army of background singers), The Wrestler (spare instrumentation bleeding into a full-band version, with Max kicking in at the end) and Lucky Day (the designated pump-fists-now crowd pleaser)… Jay Weinberg brings great energy. He’ll be sitting in for Max for part of the tour, probably during the overseas dates when the new Tonight Show starts. He’s a manic drummer and upped the pace to an almost unhealthy extent on Radio Nowhere. What was even cooler was watching Max and the rest of the band watch him - pretty much the entire gang was turned around for the three songs he sat in on… The new placement for BTR at the end of the main set was a good call, in that there was some small surprise factor to it… No Rising, Bobby Jean or Mary’s Place, mercifully… Asbury Park is almost habitable nowadays. They’ve done a lot of building and a lot of razing of the half-finished structures, and there’s now a place 100 yards away from Convention Hall where you can get a salmonella-free snack.
The bad: Clarence is in rough shape. The guy simply can’t move; I legitimately worry for his health… There are six people too many on stage. Keep Bruce, Nils, Garry, Roy, Soozie and Max, ditch Patti, Steve, Charlie, Clarence and the two new background vocalists… They’re trying to do some modern stuff with the presentation, with a stage-wide video screen behind the band. This will probably make the behind-the-stage seats (and the energy generated by the fans in ‘em) a thing of the past. Plus the images themselves looked like something dummied up by an art-school dropout… Bruce likes Good Eye a hell of a lot more than anybody else does, that’s for sure… I’d rather have heard more of the new stuff (esp. What Love Can Do and Life Itself) in place of Sunny Day, Darlington et al, but that’s not a sentiment that most fans will share… WOAD couldn’t have killed the crowd more if it had been performed as a duet by Joe Gruschecky and Joe Ely, with Garland Jeffreys on marimbas. Clarence’s whistle “solo” was wince-worthy… American Land belongs as background music in a Lucky Charms commercial… Dancing in the Dark, Lonesome Day, Sunny Day = bury it, bury it, bury it.
I dunno. A lot of this is fixable. He made a bunch of changes, most of which look very good on paper, between Monday’s show and last night. And yeah, it was night two of a tour that’ll last through December, so there’s no reason not to expect that it’ll evolve.
Set list and random effluvia here.
