Le Interviste del Boss

Live CDs: No Loss Of Gloss For the Boss
By Britt Robson
The Washington Post, April 4, 2001

Live CDs: No Loss Of Gloss For the Boss

Bruce Springsteen's "Live in New York City" is a predictably magnificent concert recording. This two-CD set, taped last summer, reminds us that Springsteen is the most heroic composer in modern pop music and demonstrates that the E Street Band can still galvanize his songs into rock-and-roll epiphanies.
It's been nearly 30 years since Springsteen became rock's first post-counterculture icon by retaining the ambitious idealism and dramatic intensity of the '60s while rebutting the class elitism and lack of moral perseverance that hollowed the rhetoric of that era. After initially aping the freewheeling poetics of '60s-vintage Bob Dylan (the only living songwriter of comparably exalted status), he became Hemingway to Dylan's Faulkner, honing his lyrics into resonantly pithy narratives that linked big dreams with the smaller, if equally profound, triumphs of retaining one's personal honor and dignity.
By reuniting with the E Street Band last year after more than a decade, Springsteen put his own previously irreproachable honor and dignity at risk. Now 51 and raising three children he fathered with his second wife, he had to prove that the reunion tour could be something more than a nostalgic traipse to a financial windfall. On that score, cynics can point to a paucity of fresh material (just two of the 20 tracks are new) and the airing of an abridged version of "Live in New York City" -- including the last-minute addition of the popular but overplayed touchstone "Born to Run" -- on HBO this Saturday night, four days after the CDs were released. In addition, those who attended any of the reunion gigs elsewhere on the tour will, when they hear this recording, note just how little variation there was in the staging and set list, down to the wording of Springsteen's sermon during "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out."
But the music itself keeps the faith. Springsteen combats banality by juxtaposing songs from different points in his career and giving other tunes strikingly different arrangements. For example, the first six songs are grouped into a pair of thematic triptychs, the first a feisty declaration of fidelity to family and friends ("My Love Will Not Let You Down," "Prove It All Night" and "Two Hearts Are Better Than One"), the second a poignant exegesis on blue-collar dreams and desperation ("Atlantic City," "Mansion on the Hill" and "The River"). Then the band takes off into incandescence, catalyzed by a blistering guitar solo by Nils Lofgren on the erstwhile ballad "Youngstown," which sets the stage for stomping versions of "Murder Incorporated" and "Badlands."
As always, the strength of the E Street Band resides in the piston-like potency of its rhythm section -- drummer Max Weinberg, bassist Gary Tallent and pianist Roy Bittan. The passage of time has been least kind to saxophonist Clarence Clemons. Once Springsteen's most vital foil, he's now relegated to the occasional clarion burst and some banging on the tambourine.
Happily middle-aged and decades removed from his Jersey roots, Springsteen continues to want it both ways, to be timeless or timely as the situation warrants. This is reflected on the two new songs from "Live in New York." The first, "Land of Hope and Dreams," is an obvious homage to the populism of Woody Guthrie. The second, which closes the HBO concert, is the bitterly desolate ballad "American Skin (41 Shots)," a requiem for Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man who was shot to death in 1999 by New York City police officers. The composer of "Born to Run" has grown to learn that sometimes you have to stop traveling on those highway/river analogies, and make a stand.

by Britt Robson

The Washington Post, April 4,

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