Is This Bruce Springsteen’s Single Greatest Live Moment?

By Andy Greene
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bruce-springsteen-greatest-live-moment-prove-it-all-night-889615/
September 24, 2019


The Capitol Theater, Passaic New Jersey (Arlen Schumer)

Bruce Springsteen has played somewhere in the ballpark of 2,600 concerts since signing to Columbia Records in 1972. Many of the ones before Born to Run came out in 1975 have been lost to history, but the vast majority since have been bootlegged and traded within fan circles. Five years ago, Springsteen’s team made the wise decision to eliminate the need for bootlegs of his current shows by offering fans the chance to download every one them in pristine sound quality.

With all of this in mind, naming his single greatest concert is a very difficult task. And zooming in even further to pick out his best performance of a singular song is just absurd. After all, he’s played “Born to Run” 1,744 times, “Thunder Road” 1,424 times, and “The Promised Land” 1,375 times. Hell, he’s even done the 1984 B side “Shut Out the Light” 35 times, and “Jump” by Van Halen” twice. One time he even did Bon Jovi’s “Bad Medicine,” though nobody is going to pick that one.

But in honor of the man’s 70th birthday yesterday, we’re going to go ahead and pick our choice for his best live performance anyway. It was “Prove It All Night” at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, on September 19th, 1978. The show was broadcast on the radio and released as the famous Pièce De Résistance bootleg that Springsteen fans have cherished for years. Springsteen finally released it himself earlier this month as an official download. The Capitol Theatre also had a camera running and you can watch the whole thing right here.

It begins with a four-minute piano and guitar duel between Springsteen and E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan before the vocals kick in. The version of the song that follows makes the “Prove It All Night” on Darkness on the Edge of Town sound like a limp, lifeless demo by comparison. The group had been touring the album for four months at this point and were in absolute peak form as a live band.

To be fair, there were 115 shows on the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour and only a tiny handful survive in crystal-clear audio like this show. Even fewer were caught on film. It’s quite possible that other shows had a “Prove It All Night” even better than 9/19/78. It’s actually quite likely. But based on what we have access to at the moment, we stand by our choice.

Springsteen kept “Prove It All Night” in his live repertoire after 1978, but the extended version from the Darkness tour vanished. The fans never gave up on hearing it again, though, and one even managed to ask Springsteen about it during a 2010 appearance on E Street Radio. “You’re one of the ’78 piano intro guys!” Springsteen said. “There are clones of you in various places throughout the United States. … It was just a device that worked nicely at the time. If you’d like to hear it again, that’ll probably never occur, my friend. But it was good while it lasted.”

Just two years later, however, he revived it at a show in Barcelona and then did it again a handful of times throughout the tour. The fans were ecstatic, but it never quite reached the highs of 1978 or, more specifically, the high of September 19th, 1978. Feel free to disagree with us, though. And if you pick “Backstreets” from a 1978 show with a long “Sad Eyes” interlude, you might have a decent case to make.

Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen - Prove It All Night (Phoenix, 78) (from Thrill Hill Vault 1976-1978)

Bruce Springsteen birthday: New artistic frontiers at 70

By Chris Jordan
https://www.app.com/story/entertainment/music/2019/09/22/bruce-springsteen-birthday-new-artistic-frontiers-70/2355234001/
September 22, 2019



Bruce Springsteen has a story to tell.

That’s one aspect of a young Springsteen that former manager Carl “Tinker” West noticed early on.

“He’s a good storyteller,” said West, who’s also a giant in the surfing world thanks to his founding of Challenger Eastern Surfboards in Ocean Township. “Vini (Lopez of the future E Street Band) brought him over to the shop (in Ocean Township). He was a smart kid, sort of quiet and he wrote songs. I said, 'You just keep writing something, you guys rehearse — work here all day, make surfboards and rock n’ roll.' ”

That was the plan. It worked.

Springsteen has sold millions of records, plays to stadiums around the world, is enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, all for his rock ‘n’ rolling. 

Now as Springsteen turns 70 on Monday, Sept., 23, he’s in an era of new artistic pursuits, new creative formats. The latest is the movie “Western Stars,” a filmed version of his latest album. He co-directed “Western Stars” with frequent collaborator Thom Zimny. The film features a performance of the folk-rock orchestral album, and vignettes starring a solo Springsteen. 

The film follows the hit “Springsteen on Broadway,” which featured the Boss baring his life story, set to song and remembrance. “Springsteen on Broadway” ran from October 2017 to December 2018.

The music play was based on his New York Times best-selling memoir “Born to Run,” which was released in September 2016. Springsteen did a nine-city book tour, where he greeted thousands of fans in person for hours at a stretch in a feat of physical and mental stamina.

The Boss stood on a platform, under lights, while he met fans. 

Cindy Marselis of Huntington Valley, Pennsylvania, was in tears after meeting Springsteen at the Freehold Barnes and Noble signing on Sept. 27, 2016. 

“I met the person I always wanted to meet,” said Marselis, at the signing. “I got to kiss him. It was awesome.”

Springsteen is still telling stories, and still on stage. But now he’s exploring new formats for the stories, and the stories he’s telling are largely his own these days.

“I think he’s said this before, but he truly envisions himself as an artist and I feel that all of these projects are in service of him wanting to tap into all of the different facets of who he is,” said Caroline Madden, 26, of Toms River.

Madden is set to release a book on Springsteen’s music in films and TV, “Springsteen as Soundtrack: The Sound of the Boss in Film and Television,” from McFarland & Co.  “That’s why he’s so unique and has endured  as an artist for so long – he doesn’t settle. He's always looking to renew himself or try something new.”

West saw that creative energy up close when Springsteen fronted the band Steel Mill, which West managed and did sound for.

“I liked Springsteen because those guys would go in the back of the shop and they would rehearse,” West said. “Vini Lopez, Danny Federici, they would write lots of music and whenever we’d get a couple of songs together that were pretty good, we'd go and try it out at Pandemonium, right at the bottom of Sunset Avenue.”

The club was less than a mile from West’s surfboard factory.

“What changes his music is that he wants to write something different,” West said. “He writes some great stories. Stories to me are what makes great music, especially the early stuff. The first two albums (‘Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.’ and ‘The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle’), people are still asking for those songs. Even so, he’s written a lot of stuff after that’s pretty damn good.”

West and Springsteen’s enduring friendship is explored in the book “Born to Run” and, subsequently in “Springsteen on Broadway.” A highlight of the play is West, Springsteen and West’s dog driving out west in West’s 1950 Chevy flat-bed truck to play a concert and meet music industry contacts.

Springsteen didn’t know how to drive until he drove the Chevy truck with West in the passenger seat. West still owns the truck.

“He knew what he wanted to do, I’m pretty sure,” said West of Springsteen’s artistic drive. “He  wanted to wow an audience and he did. He had a great band. Federici was great. Lopez was great. Little Vinnie Roslin was great.”

West used his connections and hustle to get a deal with Paramount Records.

“I finally found a deal that wouldn’t screw him over,” West said. “Then he said 'I don’t want to do Steel Mill anymore.' That’s up to you.”

“I introduced him to Mike Appel. He introduced him to John Hammond and the rest is history,” said West of Springsteen’s subsequent manager and the of the famed Columbia Records talent scout.  

The stories Springsteen has been telling in recent years are stark, revealing and confessional.

“For a long time, if I loved you or if I felt a deep attachment to you, I would hurt you if I could,” says Springsteen in “Western Stars.”

He talked without censor of his troubled relationship with his father in “Springsteen on Broadway” and has been candid about his struggles with mental illness.

“I have come close enough to (mental illness) where I know I am not completely well myself,”  Springsteen previously told Esquire. “I’ve had to deal with a lot of it over the years, and I’m on a variety of medications that keep me on an even keel; otherwise I can swing rather dramatically and ... just ... the wheels can come off a little bit. So we have to watch, in our family. I have to watch my kids, and I’ve been lucky there. It ran in my family going way before my dad.”

Springsteen is married to Patti Scialfa and they have three children, Evan, 29; Jessica, 27; and Sam, 25.

Springsteen’s non-rock ‘n’ roll work of the past few years has also framed the aging process for fans. He's showing the way to baby boomers about what to do, how to do it, and what's important in life when you get to a certain age.

The fans of his generation might have looked to John Lennon for the answers, but he didn’t get to grow old like Springsteen. Lennon would have been 78 if he were still alive.

"Aging is scary but fascinating, and great talent morphs in strange and often enlightening ways,” said Springsteen in "Born to Run."

There no official events planned to recognize Springsteen’s 70th birthday, but area venues do have Boss-themed shows, including the Brian Kirk and the Jirk’s-led “Born: Celebrating the Boss’ 70th” at the Count Basie Center in Red Bank on Wednesday, Sept. 25, and Thursday, Sept. 26. Visit thebasie.org for more info and tickets. There's also a dance party featuring all Springsteen music Monday at the Saint in Asbury Park. Visit thesaintnj.com for more info.

“Springsteen: His Hometown,” an exhibit presented by the Monmouth County Historical Association and the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music at Monmouth University, opens Sunday, Sept.  29, at the historical association in Freehold.

Ticket information is at www.SpringsteenHisHometown.com.

Preview showings of  “Western Stars” are scheduled for Oct. 19 and 23 in area movie theaters. Visit  www.fathomevents.com for more info and tickets.

Western Stars - Official Trailer

‘Western Stars’ Is Part Concert Film, Part Visual Album, All Springsteen

By David fear

https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/toronto-2019-bruce-springsteen-western-stars-review-883883/

September 13, 2019

Listen to the opening track of Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars, the album he put out this past May, and you’ll hear someone bragging about “hitch-hikin’ all day long.” He accepts a ride from a man and his pregnant wife; then he grabs a lift from someone else, just a guy free to heed the call of the open road. Two cuts later, on a song called “Tucson Train,” we get a different tale — maybe he’s a new protagonist; maybe he’s the same romantic drifter of “Hitch Hikin'” and a hundred other Springsteen tracks — who had lost his way and lost and his true love. But now he’s settled down, he’s ready to be part of society, he’s watching that 5:15 train bringing his baby to him to show up. (It takes a lot to laugh, etc.)

There are 11 more tunes, some of which are country-tinged ballads and others that are Seventies SoCal symphony pop. But you could argue that the whole story is there in those two tracks. The dude who was born to run. The man who’s finally ready to earn and embrace the human touch.

Should you still be unsure at what he’s getting at, Springsteen spells it out as plain as can be in the beginning of Western Stars, the concert film-cum-visual album he and longtime collaborator/codirector Thom Zimny premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on Thursday night. (It hits theaters October 25th.) His collection of songs about road warriors and B-movie actors, beat-up stuntmen and places where truckers and bikers drink together, is a look at “the two sides of the American character…individual freedom and communal life.” He says this over panoramic shots that turn the record’s cover of a running mustang into a literal motion picture, interspersed with clips of home movies. A close-up details a hand on a pickup’s steering wheel, ready to skeedaddle. The shot is repeated 90 or so mins later, with another hand now resting tenderly on top of the original one. This is the journey Springsteen wants you take here. It’s the same one, he notes, that he’s been taking over the last 35 years.

After releasing this solo project, the songwriter knew he wasn’t going to support the record with a tour. Still, he wanted to do something to, in his words, “get this music live to an audience.” Springsteen came up with the idea of playing the whole thing start to finish, then capture the event on film for posterity. He and Zimny, the filmmaker behind dozens of Bruce-related music videos and making-of-album docs, started to scout locations; they eventually settled on the top floor of the barn on Springsteen’s property. (“We dressed the space up quite a bit,” he admitted in a Q&A after an afternoon press screening.) The notion was to put on an intimate show “for a few friends, and to entertain the horses.” Just a small crowd, a honkytonk-style bar, a scrappy band buffered by an orchestral section, and a singer with a guitar.

And as a performance film, Western Stars is a pitch-perfect example of why this music needed to be played and heard live. On record, you can feel Springsteen working his way through some uncharacteristic styles: Jimmy Webb-style C&W lite, Brian Wilson’s baroque pop, Everly Brothers-like crooning, musical arrangements that wouldn’t be out of place on an old Harry Nilsson joint (listen to that gossamer shuffle that opens up “Hello Sunshine” and tell me you don’t expect the first line to be “Everybody’s talkin’ at me…”). Seeing him take on those songs on a stage, however, and you get the sense he owns all of it now — he’s turned all of these influences into a seamless Springsteen sound. A number of the cuts open up like an oxygenated bottle of wine, whether it’s because there’s a gaggle of string players or a single partner in crime — the interplay between him and wife/guitarist Patti Scialfa on “Stones” deepens the cut substantially — bringing something else out of him.

But what you see in the live versions is the sum of these parts as one cohesive whole. He’s a singer in sync with the musical community surrounding him, a concept as thematically on point with the album as possible. (Thankfully, the soundtrack to the film will also be released, which means you’ll get Springsteen & Co.’s gorgeous cover of Glenn Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” — an impromptu coda that, Zimny says, he didn’t know Bruce was going to do. The fact that a cameraman was nearby and quickly caught it was a stroke of luck.) Those moments share screen time with free-form scenes of Bruce wandering alone through the California desert near Joshua Tree, offering comments on both the songs and his own struggle to reconcile his stoic loner and loving husband/father sides. There are stoic poses galore, as well old clips of scruffy young Springsteen and rare Super 8 films of his honeymoon with Scialfa that Zimny found buried in the archives.

Sometimes he cracks wise (“Nineteen albums, and I’m still writing about cars”). Sometimes he goes into saloon-philosopher mode, offering the sort of deep thoughts (“Walk on through the dark, because that’s where the next morning is”) that longtime fans will tell you are part of the ride when you pay for the ticket. All of it seems part of the self-reflective phase Springsteen has been going through over the past few years; he admitted in the Q&A that the movie is the last part of “a story I haven’t really told before” that includes his 2016 memoir Born to Run and his 2018 Broadway residency. Introspection suits him, especially if this is the kind of art we’re getting from him now. He’d hoped the film would help people understand a little better what the songs were getting at. Mission accomplished.

But Western Stars isn't a therapy session. It's a portrait of lightning momentarily bottled, the way all great concert movies are. It’s the pleasure of watching a guy who’s been doing this for 50-plus years find yet another way to make it fresh without abandoning what made it great in the first place. And it’s also a personal look at someone working it out through his music, looking to find a sense of peace in the spotlight and realizing, with a sigh of relief, that he’s actually found it.

Western Stars - Official Trailer

Bruce Springsteen review, Western Stars: Sumptuous, cinematic album is nothing short of a late-period masterpiece

Mark Beaumont
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/reviews/bruce-springsteen-review-western-stars-album-tracklist-release-date-tour-a8954646.html
12 June 2019

He strapped his hands ’cross the engines of suicide machines with the small-town teenage runaways in the Seventies. He swung pickaxes into the blacktop with the blue-collar highway workers in the Eighties. He’s swigged whiskey at night with the weary and grit-dusted ever since.

Bruce Springsteen seems to have told almost every tale in the grand old storybook of American mythologies, except perhaps one: a wide-eyed Californian dreamer finds the Golden State turns sour and flees back east, to some romantic speck of a town, to pine and rehabilitate. It’s the classic pop plotline of Bacharach and David’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?”, and it’s a tale Springsteen taps repeatedly here, on his sumptuous, cinematic 19th album, which is nothing short of a late-period masterpiece.

The Western Stars are the broken, ex-addict stuntman hobbling through “Drive Fast (The Stuntman)” and the washed-up cowboy actor trawling the Hollywood gutter bar scene on the title track, reliving the time he took an onscreen bullet from John Wayne shot by shot, for shots. But Springsteen’s faded stars include anyone that’s been beaten down by California: both “Chasin’ Wild Horses” and “Tucson Train” concern heartbroken lovers hitting the inland road to rebuild their lives in some far-away town.

In further tribute to Bacharach, rather than pluck these stories from a keening guitar, Bruce lavishes them with opulent strings and Sixties easy listening horns, as if overseeing a catalogue of west coast devastation from some Malibu beach house commanding a view from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Bellagio fountains.

Having restated his rock’n’roll credentials on 2012’s Wrecking Ball, here Springsteen channels a Sixties crooner, and the album is as sleekly delivered as any Dionne Warwick TV special. “There Goes My Miracle” is pure euphoric orchestral pop, and there are parts of barfly lament “Sundown” where you’d swear The Boss has been possessed by the spirit of Gene Pitney, singing into a microphone that looks like a lollipop with his shirt collar down to his knees.

Yet, beneath the John Williams-style crescendos and Pacific Palisades twinkles, Springsteen’s sublime portraiture of the American struggle – his protagonists walking with him through the ages of life as he goes – endures. “Hitch Hikin’” and “The Wayfarer” are both charmed odes to the lost and rootless. “Sleepy Joe’s Café” is jubilant Latin pop, a remake of “Glory Days” tracing a weekend in the life of the hottest desert party bar in the state. A stark, dream-like subtlety suits Springsteen best here, as on the regretful “Stones” – a husband admitting to the marital lies that choke him daily – or the final “Moonlight Motel”, in which a ruined soul haunts the car park of the shut-down motel where long-snuffed passions ran riot.

Where most rock superstars sink into trad tedium by 69, Springsteen is still crafting sophisticated paeans of depth and illumination, a rock grandmaster worthy of the accolade. A must-have for anyone who has a heart.

Review: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Western Stars’ has a new sound but familiar lyrical themes

JAY LUSTIG

https://www.njarts.net/pop-rock/review-bruce-springsteens-western-stars-has-a-new-sound-but-familiar-lyrical-themes/
June 12, 2019

In his 2016 autobiography “Born to Run,” Bruce Springsteen wrote about his fondness for hitchhiking, and the fact that he did it often, as a young man in the ’60s.

“Every sort of rube, redneck, responsible citizen and hell-raiser the Jersey Shore had to offer, I rode with ’em,” he wrote. “I loved hitchhiking and meeting people. I miss it today.”

Western Stars, Springsteen’s new album — which will be released on June 14 – starts with a song, “Hitch Hikin’,” that evokes that enthusiasm, and the carefree days (“I follow the weather and the wind”) that are long behind him now. I don’t think it’s an accident that one of the cars mentioned in the song is a “souped-up ’72”: Springsteen was discovered and signed to Columbia Records in 1972, so that was a big coming-of-age year for him. In a sense, ’72 was his last year of innocence.

The gorgeous, consistently absorbing and only rarely innocent-sounding Western Stars is populated by the types of rubes, rednecks, responsible citizens and hell-raiser a hitchhiker might meet, in the course of a lifetime. It’s one of the most character-driven albums of Springsteen’s career, and pretty much devoid of anything resembling a rock anthem. Springsteen’s vocal delivery tends to be dry and deliberate, though it occasionally builds to a heartfelt croon.

It’s a musically cohesive album, with its rich, orchestral arrangements evoking ’60s and ’70s hits by Glen Campbell, Harry Nilsson, Burt Bacharach, Roy Orbison and others. It sounds, in other words, unlike any other Springsteen album (though there have been hints of this sound in songs such as”Girls in Their Summer Clothes,” “Secret Garden” and “Queen of the Supermarket”).

Lyrically, though, it very much continues themes that Springsteen has been developing throughout his 46 years as a recording artist. Some of the characters are born to run. Others are feeling the pulls of the ties that bind. Some are trying to find a balance between these two traits that coexist within themselves.

Springsteen signals that he knows he’s visited this thematic territory before by singing, on “The Wayfarer”:

Same sad story, love and glory goin’ ’round and ’round
Same old cliché, a wanderer on his way, slippin’ from town to town
Some find peace here on the sweet streets, the sweet streets of home
Where kindness falls and your heart calls for a permanent place of your own

Regrets? These characters have had a few. Or, as Springsteen sings in “Chasin’ Wild Horses”:

Guess it was somethin’ I shouldn’t have done
Guess I regret it now
Ever since I was a kid
Tryin’ to keep my temper down is like
Chasin’ wild horses

The album’s title has a double meaning, referring not only to celestial bodies but also, in the title track, to an actor in western movies, grown older now and living, to some extent, in the past. He is making ends meet by appearing in commercials, and enjoying the fact that people will buy him drinks because he was once killed by John Wayne in a movie. (In other words, he’s like the ex-high school baseball player in “Glory Days”).

Similarly, the resilient central character in “Drive Fast (The Stuntman)” has the scars to show for the physical chances he took in his profession. But even though he’s got a steel rod in his leg, he shrugs, “it walks me home.”

Not surprisingly, some of the most accessible songs already have been released. “Tucson Train” is a crisp, catchy song about starting over again. And “There Goes My Miracle” swells with larger-than-life emotion in a way that most of this generally understated album doesn’t.

It will be interesting to see what Springsteen does with these songs live, since they often sound more like something you’d hear on a movie soundtrack than at an arena-rock show. My guess is he’ll rearrange some of them rather than trying to reproduce them, note for note. But that’s really a question for another day. For now (or, I guess I should say, once the album comes out), just set aside some time so you can really focus on the music, maybe via headphones — so you can hear every small detail — and enjoy it.

I tend to view Springsteen’s recording career as two acts: 1973-1987 and 1992-2019 (nothing much came out between ’88 and ’91). Act I represents one of the most stunning creative surges in rock history; little in Act II comes close to the best songs and albums of Act I.

Yet Springsteen has had some moments of greatness in 1992-2019, too, and Western Stars, I believe, should be regarded as one of his best albums of that time period. And let me remind you, now, that Springsteen is 69 years old: I can’t think of another artist who has, at that age, released an album that has been so solid in its songwriting as well as such a big departure from the artist’s sonic norm.

To order the album, visit brucespringsteenstore.com.

Bruce Springsteen, Western Stars, review: born to run, destined to stick around

• Neil McCormick

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/what-to-listen-to/bruce-springsteen-western-stars-review-born-run-destined-stick/
13 June 2019


(Danny Clinch)

When Bruce Springsteen started out, he was a young man, frustrated at small-town life, roaring that he was born to run. In some ways he didn’t get very far, as he pointed out in recent one-man show Springsteen On Broadway. Over 40 years later, he still lives 10 minutes from his hometown of Freemantle, New Jersey.

Springsteen turns 70 this year. He rose to stardom exploring the drudgery, sacrifice and rewards of working-class life while expressing a profound yearning for escape. The open road looms large in his songs, and in the mythology of America, but there is a very bittersweet tang to Springsteen’s latest road trip.

“It’s the same old cliché/ Wanderer on his way/ Slipping from town to town,” Springsteen sings on The Wayfarer, acknowledging the itinerant leitmotif of his art. Even as the melody rises in a glorious rush of strings, the mood is tinged with regret. “Where are you now?” calls the wayfarer, thoughts stuck on someone left behind.

Nostalgia has always been a core part of Springsteen’s oeuvre. The souped-up Seventies sound he created with the E Street Band was never particularly progressive, amalgamating blues, folk and rock ’n’ roll with the gossamer magic of pre-Beatles pop melodies and Phil Spector-style Wall of Sound production.

On Western Stars, he follows an alternative thread of Sixties pop, evoking the orchestral baroque country of Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell. Orchestras are woven into songs at source, with lush strings, booming timpani and flourishes of horns, while pedal steel guitars and tremolo effects add electric resonances. Springsteen drives proceedings with acoustic strumming, the rough tones of his voice rooting the symphonic gorgeousness in gritty reality. It stands comparison with his very best solo albums.

Lyrics offer character sketches, lives caught with a few deft lines and evocative melodies. The title track pictures a washed-up Hollywood actor advertising Viagra, Drive Fast portrays a lonely, broken-down stuntman and Somewhere North of Nashville gives us an embittered songwriter who traded love for “a melody and time to kill”.

The narrative is far from remorselessly bleak, however, lifted by the music and by Springsteen’s compassion for his characters. He has acknowledged lifelong struggles with depression, but the soaring Hello Sunshine chooses connection over the defeatist romance of isolation. It is a reminder that Springsteen’s own life as a touring musician has been grounded in family and domesticity (he has been married to his E Street bandmate Patti Scialfa since 1991).

With its tension between escapism and responsibility, Western Stars is an album about reaching the end of the road, and what you might find there.

Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen - Western Stars (Official Video)

All He Wanted Was To Be Free: Where Bruce Springsteen's 'Western Stars' Came From

By Ann Powers
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/13/731719436/all-he-wanted-was-to-be-free-where-bruce-springsteens-western-stars-came-from
June 13, 2019


(Danny Clinch)

In 1981, after reading the paraplegic veteran Ron Kovic's memoir Born on the Fourth of July, Bruce Springsteen staged a concert to benefit the advocacy group Vietnam Veterans of America. For the encore, he played a song he hadn't performed before and hasn't since. Roger McGuinn's "The Ballad of Easy Rider" is a slow-rolling meditation on freedom's attractions and its costs that McGuinn wrote after Bob Dylan offered him one couplet scrawled on a napkin: "The river flows, it flows to the sea/wherever that river goes, that's where I want to be." The song soundtracks an idyllic early scene in Dennis Hopper's hugely influential 1969 road movie Easy Rider, as he and his co-star Peter Fonda (playing drug-dealing hippie outlaws named Billy and Wyatt) ride their motorcycles through a magical Southwestern landscape. It plays again over the closing credits, after Billy and Wyatt have been shot dead on a Louisiana back road by a passing redneck. Springsteen's cover, according to his biographer Dave Marsh, was a nod to veterans' love for the song, with its undercurrents of social exile and personal loss. Reworking it in concert, the Boss also paid tribute to a type of hit he often emulated on his own albums: the big, highly produced existential rock ballad, whose rise dates from around the time Easy Rider redefined the road movie as an expression of young people's confusion and weariness as the 1960s ended and the Nixon era began.

It's possible to trace the path taken by Springsteen's new, highly orchestrated solo album, Western Stars, all the way back to his decision to cover "The Ballad of Easy Rider" thirty years ago. McGuinn's rendition in the film is relatively spare, but his band The Byrds released a version featuring a string section, added by producer Terry Melcher, to up its odds of becoming a Top 40 hit in the style of popular crooners like Glen Campbell. In Springsteen's take (findable on YouTube) Danny Federici's trickling piano lines fill in for the strings, echoing their presence in a ghostly but convincing way. Now, all this time later, Springsteen has found his way to those strings.

Springsteen's embrace of what became known around 1966 as "orchestral pop" has struck many who've heard Western Stars as a major turn, one perhaps inspired by his recent time spent on Broadway, the home of show tunes. But Western Stars is not the Boss's West Side Story. Instead, it connects to a different sensibility altogether, one closer to Easy Rider and other cinematic landmarks of the imploding 1960s cultural revolution. More pointedly, Western Stars connects to a certain stream of pop balladry that emerged in tandem with Hollywood's turn toward hippie antiheroes – songs that ask a question similar to the one haphazardly posed by Easy Rider: Who gets hurt when people, especially men, try to be free? "All he wanted was to be free, and that's the way it turned out to be," McGuinn sings in "Easy Rider," contemplating the crash on the highway where Wyatt and Billy lay.

Writing in 1975, the film theorist Thomas Elsaesser coined the term "the pathos of failure" to describe the feeling movies like Easy Rider captured — the poignancy of modern masculinity's fatalistic drift. In Fonda's Wyatt, an American flag patch affixed to his motorcycle jacket, he saw a new kind of antihero. Leather-clad and slim, this "unmotivated hero" wanders the landscape not looking for anything in particular, but not really escaping either, just spinning wheels. His psychic exhaustion has no room for the driven energy earlier road-bound heroes possessed, whether they were the Wild West's cowboys or the nervous escapees of film noir. Those characters usually met gruesome ends but still believed in themselves, or in trying, at least. The unmotivated hero has no hope, and no feeling that it matters whether he does or not. This attitude resonated at the turn of the 1970s, as a would-be cultural revolution gave way to the square realities of mainstream life: Nixonian politics, suburban sprawl, what Elsaesser called "stunned moments of inconsequentiality." On Western Stars, in songs that aren't particularly attached to a historical moment, Springsteen pursues a similar mood of anomie.

Masculine damage is one of Springsteen's great topics, and it's not at all surprising that he revisits it throughout Western Stars. Over the decades he has written hundreds of humbly nihilistic lines like the one that opens the album's symphonic yet still somehow modest-feeling title track: "I wake up in the morning, just glad my boots are on." Continuing his long line of unreliable narrators, the voices in these songs mostly belong to older inhabitants of unstable professions – the movie industry, songwriting, shift and contract work – who pine for more stable lives with the women upon whom they rely, but are convinced they can't return to them. These characters are more seasoned versions of the petty street criminals of Springsteen's early and mid-period work, kin to the broken soldiers and immigrant drug runners of his 1980s and 1990s albums, and also to the "I" he inhabited on his more autobiographical solo albums, expressing various states of mental unrest.

Springsteen often uses the ballad form to tell the stories of these unstable characters, and he's challenged himself to keep the music fresh. On 1982's Nebraska he recorded at home, by himself, producing a sound that some considered "folk" but which was closer to the work of edgy singer-songwriters like Townes Van Zandt. 1995's The Ghost of Tom Joad conscientiously connected to folk traditions. More recently, he's worked with pop-savvy studio men like Brendan O'Brien and Ron Aniello, who's also behindWestern Stars, dipping more than a toe in the classic pop sound he's now fully embraced. Two of his best songs from this century, "The Wrestler" and "Girls in Their Summer Clothes," could have easily appeared on Western Stars, with their stories of alluring ramblers who are starting to fade into the cultural background, set within sumptuous arrangements. This album feels like an extension of that work. His characters here voice a hard-won maturity, though most remain unfulfilled. Sometimes, as on the sanguine early single "Hello Sunshine," they even are able to compromise their dreams and settle for a kind of happiness. They represent the imagined afterlives of the unmotivated heroes of Easy Rider, trying to figure out what their unexpectedly longer lives mean.

To find inspiration for stories like these, Springsteen looked not to the movies of his young adulthood, which usually ended in fiery explosions or shootouts or sudden cuts to black, but to the songs that brought the unmotivated hero's voice to the radio in the same cultural moment. Early reviews of Western Stars note the sources: the songbooks of rock and soul-inspired 1960s and 1970s hitmakers like Jimmy Webb, Harry Nilsson and the team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Their songs don't sound like they belong to outsiders: awash in violins and woodwinds, they claim none of the raucousness of rock and roll. But they express loss, and the state of being lost, as effectively as Easy Rider did in its more unhinged and violent way. "Everybody's Talkin'," written by Fred Neil and covered by Harry Nilsson in a version that became the theme for another key film of 1969, Midnight Cowboy, is a prime example. Neil's original version was spare, but Nilsson's adds strings, and they almost constitute a drone, creating an undertow that propels the guitar and lightly brushed drum and Nilsson's slippery vocals down the river toward oblivion. "Everybody's talkin' at me," he complains. "I can't hear a word they're sayin', only the echoes of my mind." The song is an expression of paranoia as much as it is a declaration of independence; it's about pushing off, but never landing.

How did songs like this, so obviously about trouble and defeat, find a home at the heart of mainstream pop? Making losers beautiful, they poetically reinforced the anxieties many people were feeling about the costs of freedom. Vietnam was coming to its ugly end, and the kids who'd hoped to change the world were starting to feel the damage their more reckless moments had wrought. A beautiful arrangement could hold the dark emotions of those times in a comforting embrace. This paradoxical combination is still what resonates about these songs. It's what brings the tears when we listen to the best songs by Jimmy Webb, like the soldier's anguished self-elegy "Galveston" or the workingman's crisis of faith "Wichita Lineman." The pathos of this music resides in its blend of musical sophistication and lyrical rawness. This is what Springsteen finds on Western Stars. Maybe it felt like a chance to take a path he'd avoided as a young rocker more intrigued by soul music and then punk; maybe he also recognized an echo that resonates today — a comforting musical palette that offered room to ruminate at a historical juncture, like our own, imbued with anxiety. "Make it easy on me just for a little while," Nilsson sings in "Don't Forget Me," another song that Springsteen might have spun while writing these. He's begging a lover he's probably wronged to put up with his pathetic ways, or at least his memory, for a little while; but he's also defining what his song does for the listener, creating a velvet cushion upon which to rest while pondering rough realities.

It's easy to make a playlist full of tracks like this from the 1960s and 1970, any of which might have been inspiration for Springsteen as he crafted Western Stars. (I've done so; the original article link above to find it) Start with "Early Morning Rain," written and recorded in 1966 by Gordon Lightfoot, one of the key figures in the mainstream folk revival, which embraced new sonic approaches – including string-kissed, Beatles-inspired arrangements – to render the sounds and stories of traditional music more accessible. The key line in Lightfoot's song — "You can't jump a jet plane like you can a freight train" – brings folk into the aerospace age, replacing the Woody Guthrie-era image of the wandering hobo with a less romantic one, of a traveler stranded by his own limitations within the cold confines of city life. Here, the drifter becomes modern. Folk rock offered many memorable takes on this figure over the years: the more sanguine one in Tom Rush's "No Regrets"; the beautifully bitter "Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues," by Danny O'Keefe; the drugged-out version in John Phillips's "Holland Tunnel"; Jackson Browne's road dog considering his lot in "The Load Out." This is the easy rider who makes it long enough to feel washed up. He shows up a few times on Western Stars: He's the songwriter who didn't make it in "Somewhere North of Nashville," and the stunt man who's feeling the pain of his injuries in "Drive Fast."

Country music is another prime conduit for exquisitely rendered existential angst. In tandem with the blues, it developed as music's repository of fully adult stories: It's where divorce, parenting, aging and other complex topics are tackled, and where subjects age, too, facing the consequences they've generated. In the 1960s, as it intersected with folk and, more subtly, rock, country also explored the tension generated when unvarnished emotions met ornate orchestration. Stars like Kris Kristofferson, Glen Campbell, Charlie Rich, Ronnie Milsap, Bobbie Gentry and even Elvis Presley made powerful songs at this crossroads. So did Nashville-influenced rockers like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, whose "A Man Needs A Maid," from 1972, is one the most vulnerable and disturbing musical expressions of the pathos of failure ever recorded. The lyric's deeply vulnerable (and paternalistic) expression of masculinity's emotional shortcomings – Young literally cries for a woman to help feed and clothe him, but then go away — gains its pathos from a grand orchestral arrangement. It's a lot like what Springsteen reaches for on Western Stars – long-cultivated loneliness turned into high drama.

The crisis Young expresses in "A Man Needs a Maid," like the one Springsteen's faithless lover faces in "Stones," doesn't immediately seem like a political one; and yet it is a reckoning with masculinity, an expression of how clinging to its privileges can destroy intimacy and make a man feel lost. The legacy Western Stars taps traveled similar ground when artists like Bill Withers or Marvin Gaye carried it into soul. "Gotta keep movin'," Gaye sings in "Trouble Man," exuding machismo but also deep disquiet. The song's sumptuous groove soothes but the voice at its core unsettles. A trouble man is a troubled man.

Western Stars sends this message, too, from a different point in time. The antiheroes Springsteen brings to life are not young men playing fast and loose with their destinies; they're not Easy Rider's Wyatt and Billy, nor are they his own earlier takes on those same characters, the Spanish Johnnys and Eddies and ragamuffin gunners he created in the 1970s. The men who populate Western Stars have sought freedom and know its edges in an unfree world. He knows these men well; on some level, they are him. Honoring a musical legacy he loves, Springsteen finds new life in familiar stories. "All he wanted was to be free, and that's the way it turned out to be," McGuinn wrote in the song Springsteen shared so long ago. Western Stars finds new places where that line can lead.

Bruce Springsteen Looks West, With Strings and Sorrows

By Jon Pareles
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/arts/music/bruce-springsteen-western-stars-review.html
June 12, 2019


(Danny Clinch)

Amid Bruce Springsteen’s huge songwriting catalog, “Western Stars” is a side trip in place and time: a homage to a bygone pop era and a return to one of his recurring fascinations — the present-day American West as envisioned and, in the early 1990s, inhabited by a native New Jerseyan. It’s not an album courting new young fans or claiming any 2019 zeitgeist. It’s more like a speculative alternate history: What if Springsteen’s music had taken a very different direction at the start?

“Western Stars” arrives following the explicit autobiography and starkly staged sincerity of “Springsteen on Broadway,” even though it was in the works before those performances. Instead of trying to extend that revealing tour de force, the new album veers elsewhere; it’s an experiment in genre and narratives. Most (and perhaps all) of the songs are other people’s stories, not Springsteen’s own. In them, the West — California along with Arizona and Montana — can be a promise of open spaces and second chances. But more often, the western horizon is the end of the line, where Springsteen’s characters find themselves alone with their regrets.

The music itself is a kind of character study. It harks back to an early 1970s pop style that Springsteen — now 69, whose debut album appeared in 1973 — had nothing to do with at the time. “Western Stars” revisits a sound that found a place in Los Angeles studios — particularly in Laurel Canyon in the late 1960s and early 1970s — and in Nashville as a means to get country singers onto pop radio by making country music “countrypolitan.” The era’s elaborate productions — the sound of performers like Glen Campbell, Harry Nilsson, Charlie Rich and the Mamas and the Papas — enfolded pristinely recorded acoustic guitars and keyboards, understated drums and mere whispers of country-style pedal steel guitar into lofty orchestral arrangements. At the time, it could turn corny and overwrought. In 2019, however, the style is a direct repudiation of current pop: smooth and liquid rather than rhythmic and sparse, and relying largely on acoustic, physical instruments (though on Springsteen’s album, a few synthesizers slip in).

Those early 1970s productions were unapologetically decorous, premeditated, luxurious and grown-up. Yet often, in songs like Skeeter Davis’s “The End of the World” or Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” the plush orchestral pop hits of the 1960s and 1970s cushioned sorrow and solitude. They were worlds away from the turbocharged bar band that would become Springsteen’s E Street Band, and they were clearly aiming for the middle of the road, not the fast lane. The craftsmanship in those studio efforts was as self-effacing as it was substantial; the hired musicians were intended to serve the song, not to be noticed. As a lifelong student of American popular music, Springsteen clearly noticed.

On “Western Stars,” a few songs — “Tucson Train,” “Sundown,” “Stones” — sound like the E Street Band could be swapped in for the orchestra. But Springsteen strives to meet his chosen idiom more than halfway. He wrote songs that thrive on the swells and undulations of orchestral drama, and he sings with long-breathed phrases that aren’t exactly crooning — he’s not built for that — but that set out to sustain more than they exhort.

One of the centerpieces of “Western Stars” is “Chasin’ Wild Horses.” Its narrator did something awful in his youth, then left home to lose himself as a cowboy, chasing wild horses in Montana for the Bureau of Land Management, sometimes shouting a lost love’s name to an empty echo. Its guitar-picking intro bears an odd, doubtless coincidental, resemblance to the Lady Gaga-Bradley Cooper hit “Shallow,” but its gathering impact comes from its expansive arrangement, which opens and deepens around his voice like an endless prairie.

The arc of the album — Springsteen still treats an album as a whole — moves from hope to desperation to elegy. The album begins with “Hitch Hikin’,” whose footloose narrator easily gets ride after ride (including one from a “gear head in a souped-up ’72,” to pin down the era). Next is “Wayfarer,” proclaiming chronic wanderlust as strings, horns, glockenspiel, women’s voices and even castanets arrive to cheer him onward.

But as usual for Springsteen, “Western Stars” doesn’t aim for comfort. Like his California-centered album from 1995, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” its songs depict people who usually go unnoticed and who have little left to lose. The title song, “Western Stars,” is told by an aging actor — once a star of westerns — who is still working, picking up women and occasionally getting recognized: “Once I was shot by John Wayne,” he sings. “That one scene’s bought me a thousand drinks.”

Many of the album’s characters are men trying to lose themselves in physical labor, to sweat out memories of a love that they failed to hold onto. “Hard work’ll clear your mind and body/The hard sun will burn out the pain,” Springsteen sings in “Tucson Train,” and that’s one of the few songs on the album that anticipates a happy ending. In “Drive Fast (The Stuntman),” amid keening strings that recall “Wichita Lineman,” the singer is a stuntman itemizing his broken bones and scars, reminiscing about a romance on a B movie set. And in “There Goes My Miracle,” there’s only the barest hint of a back story behind the loss: just an orchestral crescendo and a leaping melody, stately and bereft.

By the end of the album, the possibilities of escape and renewal have long since faded away. “Hello Sunshine” is both the album’s first single and its summation. The sound is cozy: major chords, a light beat like a cruising train. But Springsteen sings about how empty the endless road ahead had become: “Miles to go is miles away,” he warns, and his refrain is actually a plea: “Hello sunshine, won’t you stay?” The rhythm guitar is a pleasant rustle, the pedal-steel guitar lends a golden glow and the strings are a warm bath. Yet as soothing as they are, they’re nowhere near enough to make things right.