MUSIC PREVIEW
Sunday, May 15, 2005
John Soeder
Cleveland Plain Dealer Pop Music Critic
The "BROOOCE!" cheers gave way to BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! when Bruce Springsteen launched his solo tour last month at Detroit's Fox Theatre.
Pounding out a 4/4 beat with his boot, the Boss wailed into a harmonica and howled into a miniature microphone. What sounded at first like a gritty old blues tune turned out to be a Mississippi Delta-style overhaul of "Reason to Believe," a declaration of hard-earned faith originally found on Springsteen's 1982 album "Nebraska."
His new one-man show is full of surprises - and it suits him.
"It's a great night for me," Springsteen said during a recent phone interview. "It's just you, your audience, your ideas, your music."
Accompanying himself on acoustic and electric guitars and even piano at times, the iconic singer-songwriter has been mixing old favorites in concert with a hefty serving of material from his latest solo album.
By turns unsettling and uplifting, "Devils & Dust" is a collection of songs about moral crises, new beginnings and the hopes and fears of everyday people in uncertain times. The music ranges from roots-rock to folk to country.
Springsteen is promoting "Devils & Dust" with a 14-date U.S. tour, including a show tonight at Cleveland State University Wolstein Center.
One of the few props keeping him company onstage is an antique lamp. Sharp-eyed fans might recognize it from a video for his new album's title track.
Springsteen, 55, shed light on the lamp -- and weightier topics ranging from his endorsement of John Kerry for president to the future of the E Street Band -- when we spoke to him before a gig in Oakland, Calif.
OK, first things first: What's the deal with the lamp?
It's the magic lamp! (laugh) All energy emerges from the lamp! We just had it in the video, so I brought it along.
It was in my house. We thought, "Let's bring that lamp and put it onstage." There's no special story behind it.
It went crashing to the floor last night, however. I was stomping really hard. I stomped it right off the table, onto the floor. There's a big dent in it, but we got it back up and running.
You've said the songs on "Devils & Dust" deal with people whose souls are at risk. Did you try to stick to the same theme when choosing compatible songs from your previous albums to perform on this tour?
No. I don't operate from the outside in. I'm usually operating from what feels right. Later on, I'll go back and I may make the connections, and I'll be able to say, "Oh, I ended up doing this."
You have your 30 years of craft and you call on it, and it all works, hopefully, in this very integrated fashion and in a way that is not fundamentally an intellectual exercise. The emotions and your feelings are always leading the way.
I may read something in a book or in a newspaper or see it in a movie. Somebody may say something -- anything that sparks that particular creative light. Then I'll follow that.
That's my approach to songwriting.
As far as putting a record together, once again, you go on what feels right. Regardless of how detailed the lyrics are, you're always being led by what the songs are saying emotionally.
On this particular record, the main thing I was looking for was just the best record I had at that moment.
I had a year off. Patti [Scialfa, Springsteen's wife and mother of their three children] worked on her record ["23rd Street Lullaby"] and went touring. So I spent a lot of time with the kids.
I said, "Gee, I have good music that I was interested in before I started to work again with the E Street Band."
I had all these songs that were holding up well. I was interested in those characters.
All the stuff was recorded in about a take or two.
I've been lucky in that I've had a lot of good material the past eight or nine years.
After my review of "Devils & Dust" ran, I got an e-mail from an angry reader who found it "outrageous" for you to deliver the title track from the perspective of a soldier in Iraq. The reader wrote, "You have to be in the soldiers' shoes to express [their] point of view . . . and the Boss sure doesn't speak for them." How would you respond?
As a writer and as a citizen, you take in the world around you, and you take your shot at interpreting it.
That was a song where I was basically trying to get at . . . some of the confusion that being young and being put in that position have to bring you. The confirmation of it is in the newspapers every day.
You're put in a situation of making difficult and impossible choices that I believe even the best training can prepare you for only so much, which is why when our soldiers came home from all the wars that have been fought as long as I've been alive, there was an enormous period of attempting to readjust and to sort through the things they were asked to do. That's what I was trying to get at.
From fresh starts to surprise endings
To the delight of fans, Springsteen is back in full storyteller mode on the road, prefacing songs with personal anecdotes and rambling off-the-cuff commentaries.
Before he bashed out "Part Man, Part Monkey" in Detroit, he couldn't resist a poke at the Bush administration:
"Evolution is in doubt in the White House. We're just not sure about it. We're sure about contribution . . . retribution . . . execution. Evolution? Very iffy."
By way of introducing "For You," an ivory-tickling valentine dating to his 1973 debut, "Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.," Springsteen recalled a hilarious lecture by his father:
"My dad was explaining to me . . . that love songs are actually a government conspiracy, each and every one of 'em, a government conspiracy to get you married and force you to pay taxes."
Before the rousing "Long Time Comin'," one of several "Devils & Dust" tunes about making a fresh start, Springsteen talked about his relationship with his own children:
"I always meet people and they go, Oh, man, your kids must think you're cool.' Nope. They don't think I'm cool at all. And they shouldn't. It's the parents' job to be uncool."
You've written about family ties before, but you really hone in on bonds between mothers and sons on the new album. What got you thinking along those lines?
I don't really know. Maybe it's because I hadn't written much about it in the past.
Mothers, they're the soul protectors, y'know?
I had a friend of mine [Fiona Chappel, to whom the ballad "Silver Palomino" is dedicated] who passed away and left two young sons. It was very difficult. That might've had something to do with it.
The mother-child connection is so intense. It's so deep.
On the songs I've written on this particular record, it's severed -- in "Silver Palomino," "Black Cowboys," "Jesus Was an Only Son" and "The Hitter." Those songs are [about] how people try to regain their footing -- or don't.
On "Matamoros Banks" and the version of "The Promised Land" you're performing on this tour, you do this high-pitched keening, expressing a lot of emotion without any words. How did you come to develop that coyote croon, for lack of a better description?
I started in the early '90s. On the "Tom Joad" tour, I would end the night with it, as I do on this tour.
It removes even the lyrics from the evening, and it just becomes purely musical. There's something in it that sums up what you've sung.
I don't know exactly what that is. But it's an unusual sound for a man to make. (laugh)
You would have to go back to the doo-wop singers who sang in those beautiful falsettos. Those have gotten lost in the past 10 or 20 years. You forget all the unbelievable and beautiful falsetto singing by men that was occurring in the '50s and '60s. These were just amazing voices. They communicated an integration of men and women that was unique. Also, it's a very sensual sound.
So it's something I've tried to develop. On this record, I got up my nerve to sing a whole song in it ["All I'm Thinkin' About"].
I was lucky, 'cause I didn't have it before my mid-40s. Through the '70s and the '80s, I never had it.
It's very unusual to sustain that if you do a lot of hard singing. The first thing that goes usually is your top. But it was just something I came upon.
"Reno" continues to receive a lot of attention. The last line -- "It wasn't the best I ever had, not even close" -- got a laugh from the audience in Detroit, although I didn't take it as a punch line when I first heard the song.
What I took that for was surprise. The cool thing about the first three shows [including two warm-up gigs in New Jersey] was people hadn't heard the record.
They didn't know what was coming. So it was sort of neat.
I enjoyed it myself, those first few nights where I was playing a lot of this music. I knew for the most part people had heard none of it.
I remember when I first played ["Reno"] for Steve [Van Zandt, E Street Band guitarist]. He expected a different ending. It was a line that caught him by surprise, too.
The funny thing is, since people have heard it, the surprise is kind of gone. It's a different experience. But it was interesting the first few nights.
Paying the cost to be the Boss
Starbucks, a growing force in the music-retail industry, opted not to stock "Devils & Dust" after the coffeehouse chain's executives deemed "Reno" too hot to handle. The song's graphic depiction of an encounter with a prostitute leaves little to the imagination, although the tone is more sad than salacious.
"If you brought any young kids with you, it might be a nice time to check out those fine T-shirts we have on sale," Springsteen said before he sang "Reno" on opening night.
He flaunted his seldom-seen prowess on the piano during the epic "Racing in the Street," raised the roof with a dramatically backlit rendition of the Sept. 11-inspired anthem "The Rising" and struck a poignant chord to the tune of "Matamoros Banks," a "Devils & Dust" standout about the dreams and death of an illegal immigrant.
Nearly 2½ hours and several standing ovations after the transcendent concert began, a sweat-soaked Springsteen tapped a heartbeat rhythm on the body of his acoustic guitar as he brought it all home with a no-frills, all-thrills reworking of "The Promised Land."
Are these solo shows more or less exhausting than a typical gig with the E Street Band?
They're mentally very intense, because if there's any noise coming off the stage, you're making it. (laugh) There's not a sax solo.
On the other hand, they're somewhat less physically taxing, because obviously there isn't the physical show that's involved [with the band]. High-volume rock 'n' roll music extracts a different type of physical toll.
They're just different. I enjoy them both very much, and I look forward to playing with the band again in the not-too-distant future.
But this is something I also enjoy very, very, very deeply.
You performed here in Cleveland last year not only on the Vote for Change Tour, but also at the John Kerry rally on the eve of Election Day. Since then, you've been asked a lot about the repercussions of sticking your neck out politically. Given the fact the new album debuted at No. 1 and given the success of the solo tour so far -- 7,000 tickets for the Cleveland show were snatched up in three minutes! -- I have to wonder: Backlash? What backlash?
I never went into it expecting that. I have a long relationship with my audience that over the years has had ups and downs.
Every time you make a new record, you'll get some letters: "Why didn't you make a record like the last one?" (laugh)
Or "I liked it when you were writing just about the cars and the girls."
You're always in the process of an ongoing dialogue with your audience. Whatever we did during the election ends up being a part of that conversation. You get letters back that are harsh or nasty. And that's part of the conversation.
Whether I lost some fans or not, I don't know. Whether I picked up any fans or not, I don't know. But I think all in all, after 30 years, your relationship with the audience you've been playing for and singing for is greater than any single act.
You're constantly in the process of doing a wide variety of different things that move you in this direction, move you in that direction.
I met some Republican fans who just said they stayed away from those shows or they didn't agree. It was part of the dialogue.
I have a lot of pride in my audience. I think I've built up a very close relationship, one that has bred, hopefully, a good deal of mutual respect.
The audiences I've had on this tour so far are some of the best I've ever had, just amazing.
The E Street Band expanded into a small orchestra on recent recordings and tours, with more personnel than ever. Do you foresee going back to a leaner, meaner E Street Band at some point?
No, because everyone took many roads, and we all arrived at this particular location. The guys and girls who are there now, that's the E Street Band.
I just recently heard some of us when we were a five-piece unit. It was quite a smaller sound. It was interesting, back in '73 and '74. If I went to play the piano, there was no guitar! (laugh)
That was a great little band. But it was very different.
It was an organic growth, in that it just moved in its own direction.
I can't ever imagine -- I mean, would I ever play in a smaller band unit at some point, in some other type of project? I might, depending on what music I wrote.
Some of the band things on this record aren't quite E Street Band material. It's a slightly different sound, a smaller, roots-rock sound.
I leave all the doors open. I listen to the music, and I try to go where it takes me.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
jsoeder@plaind.com, 216-999-4562
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