Special to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Last Updated: Aug. 6, 2005
Bruce Springsteen has built his reputation on 30 years of rock 'n' roll concerts in which he shouted himself hoarse, slid across the stage on his knees and danced to a backbeat resembling a thunderstorm strained through an amplifier.
For years, he was rarely quiet on stage, lowering the volume only occasionally for a grand-piano version of "Thunder Road" or "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out." His sparse, acoustic-guitar album "Nebraska," when it came out in 1982, was the lone anomaly in a loud body of work.
But Springsteen, 56, is today the veteran of three acoustic albums, a moody and quiet hit single, "Streets of Philadelphia," and two soft-spoken solo tours, including this year's "Devils & Dust," which stops tonight at the Bradley Center.
His collection of Woody Guthrie-style ballads and quiet, moody anthems is starting to catch up to his better-known catalog of "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" "Born in the U.S.A." and "Badlands."
His 1995 "The Ghost of Tom Joad" tour was the singer's first attempt at on-stage solitude - he hushed the crowd, which seemed strange at the time - but "Devils & Dust" is a major leap forward.
With a variety of instruments, including pump organ, electrified harmonica and acoustic guitar, he retools familiar songs from "Nebraska" so they're almost unrecognizable, gives folksy speeches, slows the staple "The Promised Land" into a dirge and throws in rarities from "Wild Billy's Circus Story" to "The Promise."
So with due respect to "Rosalita" and his other frantic rock 'n' rollers, here's a list of Springsteen's 11 best quiet songs, many of which he plays on the "Devils & Dust" tour:
• "Thunder Road" (acoustic live version, from "Live/1975-'85"): Springsteen has performed the epic opener from 1975's "Born to Run" live hundreds of times, in several different configurations, from out-and-out rocking to almost a hymn. This 1975 version, with the singer accompanying himself on piano, perfectly captures the melancholy and adventure at the heart of the song.
• "Stolen Car" (from 1980's "The River"): There are few more frightening characters in rock lyrics than the man who drives a stolen car down on Eldridge Ave., lamenting his torn-apart marriage and muttering unconvincingly to himself that "I'm gonna be all right." Undoubtedly, he went on to commit the crimes depicted in "Nebraska," released two years later.
• "Johnny 99" (from "Nebraska"): The most memorable song on an album of low-key rock 'n' roll classics, "Johnny 99" is about a man who loses his job, kills a night clerk, stands before a judge, hears his mother cry and goes away for a long, long time. Jamming his harmonica into a microphone, Springsteen re-imagines it as slurred, Howlin' Wolf-style blues on the "Devils & Dust" tour.
• "Meeting Across the River" (from 1975's "Born to Run"): The morning-after antidote to the wild-eyed mayhem on "Born to Run," this whispery story-song (complete with jazz trumpet) about a man seduced into a drug deal is a cautionary tale indeed.
• "Cautious Man" (from 1987's "Tunnel of Love"): Springsteen pulled this obscurity - about the man with "love" and "fear" tattooed on opposite hands - out of nowhere earlier this year on his solo tour. It's a reminder of how many gems are hidden on the underrated "Tunnel of Love."
• "Streets of Philadelphia" (from the "Philadelphia" soundtrack): Springsteen has used soft, ghostly synthesizers in many songs, but none are more evocative than this barebones story of AIDS patients changing physical form and preparing for death.
• "Youngstown" (from "The Ghost of Tom Joad"): John Kerry picked "No Surrender" for his campaign anthem, but no song in Springsteen's repertoire quite captures the bust following the steel-mill boom as well as this bleak northeastern Ohio anthem.
• "Johnny Bye Bye" (B-side): Elvis is dead! But who's this "Johnny" kid riding in the hearse, in this haunted, minor-key homage to both the King and Chuck Berry's "Bye Bye Johnny"?
• "Paradise" (from 2002's "The Rising"): Springsteen proved on "Nebraska" that he could inhabit first-person songs about American murderers and bandits as well as Johnny Cash or Marty Robbins. Here he pulls the same trick with Middle Eastern suicide bombers - with equally disturbing if not quite so empathetic results.
• "My Beautiful Reward" (from 1992's "Lucky Town"): As with everything else on his early-'90s misfire "Lucky Town," this mid-tempo rocker is overproduced and a little peppy, but in recent concerts Springsteen has brought it back to life - on a pipe organ. It has one great metaphor: "I came crashing down like a drunk on a barroom floor."
• "Reno" (from "Devils & Dust"): On record, this profane ode to a hooker and her devoted client comes across like the dirty-old-man sequel to the older rocker "Candy's Room." In concert, Springsteen gives the new song life and context, and the protagonist's desperation and self-hatred come across in vivid, sympathetic detail.
Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Aug. 7, 2005.
No comments:
Post a Comment