Asbury Park Press: Springsteen Kicks up "Dust" in Pa.

Concert Review
Springsteen kicks up "Dust" in Pennsylvania
Published in the Asbury Park Press 05/19/05
BY MICHAEL RILEY
STAFF WRITER

Imagine this:A community has gathered in the darkness. Friends and strangers sit next to one other and they are waiting for some word. You get the feeling that this community has been isolated for some time, cut off from the larger world, either by disaster or fear.

One of their own, though, has ventured forth beyond the walls, traveled far in the wide world and come back home. He has seen some things, heard some things and done some things — most of them terrible, some of them extraordinarily wonderful. As the pilgrim stands before the crowd, he makes no grand pronouncements. He seems puzzled by both the evil and the beauty in the world. All he can promise, as he begins to tell his tale, is to share his story as faithfully as possible with the hope that, possibly, he and his fellow citizens will together find the courage to begin to make some sense of it all.

This seems to be the sort of drama that Bruce Springsteen is up to these days during his solo acoustic tour in support of his recently released "Devils & Dust" album. That tour made a stop at the Tower Theater in Upper Darby, Pa., on Tuesday night.

The show lasted nearly 2 1/2; the enthusiastic and respectful audience members seemed to know that they weren't going to hear "Rosalita" or "Jungleland." He opened the show with "My Beautiful Reward," a quiet song from the "Lucky Town" album; it's a song about finding your heart's desire and realizing that the searching and yearning continue. He played it on a small pump organ, giving it a churchlike feel.

Virtual one-man band

Immediately after that somber beginning, Springsteen played a nearly unrecognizable version of "Reason to Believe" (a song from "Nebraska") that examines the lives of people clinging to what seems a fruitless faith in something or other. Springsteen played it as a harsh blues, his voice somehow electronically distorted and every footfall a thunderclap of amplification. Throughout the show, Springsteen was something of a one-man band, moving from guitar and harmonica to organ and piano with ease.

He played eight of the dozen songs on "Devils & Dust," a record that Springsteen has said chronicles the lives of people "whose souls are at risk."

And, in fact, most of the songs he played either explicitly or implicitly deal with the burdens and joys of faith. He traced his own journey of faith back to his childhood catechism classes, by way of prefacing his own version of the Pieta, "Jesus Was an Only Son."

When it comes to lambasting a fundamentalism that he believes can be toxic, Springsteen has realized that ridicule can be an effective tool. He prefaced his performance of the reggae-influenced B-side "Part Man, Part Monkey" with a rap about efforts to discourage the teaching of evolution in public schools. In New Jersey, he said, joking with the audience, "we believe in evolution — it's our only hope." Apart from that comment and a call for a humane immigration policy before a song about a Mexican man dying in his attempt to make it to America ("Matamoros Banks"), he kept politics out of his concert.

And while the harsh strictures of some theology are condemned in "Part Man, Part Monkey" and in the premiere of the never-before-performed "The Iceman" (from his "Tracks" collection), Springsteen and the people he sings about seem convinced that a life without faith may be a life lost.

From the stately "Real World" to the radio-familiar "Promised Land," the audience heard songs in which the power of faith is extolled. There is a line in "Promised Land": "Mister, I ain't a boy, no I'm a man/And I believe in a promised land." Sung in 1978 as a kind of youthful brag, the singer states it as a simple fact in 2005.

And the joys of this world were explored in such songs as "Ramrod" and the new "Maria's Bed."Springsteen closed the show back at the pump organ and played "Dream Baby Dream," a song by the band Suicide.

His voice at times filled with emotion, he kept singing, "All I want is to see you smile," but it was sung in the voice of a man who is not sure at all moments whether smiles will endure — or dreams, for that matter.

At some point in the song, Springsteen moved away from the organ and music continued, ghostly and ethereal. He walked off the stage still singing the refrain.

And the gathered community stood and cheered.Maybe, some of them were surely thinking, it is time to move again into the wide world full of sorrow and hope.