Skip to main content

Springsteen rocks Rochester, examines life on 'The River'

Follow the link to more photos.

 

Buddy Holly, Hank Williams, Ike Turner, Big Mama Thornton, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Johnny Cash, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie. We can argue all night about who built rock and roll.

I don’t think Bruce Springsteen rises to that level of innovator.

But I will say this: I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a performer move so comfortably within that framework, over such a long career, making such graceful adjustments as he grows older, than Springsteen. He is a craftsman of rock and roll, using all of the correct tools. And the evidence for that, presented Saturday night for a sold-out Blue Cross Arena by Springsteen & the E Street Band, was overwhelming.

The tour’s premise is a front-to-back presentation of The River, his 1980 double album, to use the vintage terminology of those vinyl days. Followed by a set drawn from four decades of the 66-year-old Springsteen. Three hours and 11 minutes. Thirty-four songs. One concert, two different moods. Let’s start with the second half of the show.

Springsteen & the E Street Band had already been playing for 1½ hours, the last echoes of The River hadn’t left the building, and they still had enough energy to turn the dial up to 11. From “Night” to “Badlands,” it leaped to 15. “Badlands” has become almost the arena anthem rocker that is “Born to Run” and “Because the Night,” with guitarist Nils Lofgren’s spinning, stumbling, manic dancing solo. “The Rising” gave way to an a cappella opening – Springsteen and the entire audience – for “Thunder Road.” Throw in the exuberance of “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” with Springsteen singing a duet with a Muppet, tossed up from the audience, that guitarist Steven Van Zandt dangled in front off his face.

There were also the now-familiar Springsteen tropes, including taking requests from signs held up by the crowd. He went with “I Wanna Be With You” and “I’m Goin’ Down,” then later scooped up a sign calling for “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” which brings out the video images of the two E Streeters who have passed away, Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band perform atBuy Photo

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band perform at the Blue Cross Arena at the Community War Memorial. (Photo: CARLOS ORTIZ/@CFORTIZ_DANDC/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)

 

And the signs held by women pleading for Springsteen to pick them as dance partners during “Dancing in the Dark.” An unusual number of men also displayed signs offering their wives to Springsteen. He opted for a 65-year-old woman who not only danced with The Boss, but when he handed her an acoustic guitar she jammed away on it.

“Do you have anything left, Rochester?” Springsteen demanded, and the answer was yes, so he responded with The Isley Brothers’ “Shout.” The house lights were on through most of this last hour, revealing a sea of pumping fists, the arena looking like a giant frat party.

As the crowd streamed out of the arena, stepping over flattened beer cans, it’s too easy to say that the all-out rockers of the second half stole the show. But no, that was only the easy way to look at the evening.

The River is an ambitious album, but from the opening “The Ties That Bind” it has the rocking accessibility of a bar band at work. This despite the fact that The E Street Band, nine members on this tour, is a complex machine.

And that complexity is evident in The River: The Ties That Bind. Released on Dec. 4, it demonstrates the work that went into the album. The box set is four CDs of 54 songs, with outtakes, including “Meet Me in the City,” which opened Saturday’s show before the band proceeded to The River proper. Plus three DVDs that include a documentary and a concert, celebrating the 35th anniversary of The River. Springsteen wrote and rewrote that thing, discarding pieces as a novelist would with otherwise well-written chapters that didn’t fit the book.

 

There are plenty of wild-at-heart rockers on The River. The exuberant “Sherry Darling,” with Springsteen bring in with shouts of “Make some party noises, Rochester!” Plus “Two Hearts,” “Cadillac Ranch” and “Ramrod,” equating young women to a hot-rod engine, an accurate-enough analogy for many 21-year-old guys. And Springsteen crowd surfing through the end of “Hungry Heart.”

But those songs aren’t the true heart of the collection. “I wanted to make a big album that felt like life,” Springsteen told the audience. The River, he said, was his “coming of age” album.

Life is sometimes a sadness. Springsteen explained how “Independence Day” is about a family's “dreams and hopes that maybe didn’t work out so perfectly,” and how they end up “working out compromises they had to make.” An extended Roy Bittan piano solo opening really escalated the drama of the epic, brilliantly desperate “Point Blank,” with Van Zandt’s ragged backing vocal shadowing Springsteen like a cautionary ghost.

Then album-closing “Wreck on the Highway” and its sense of mortality. The final lines still take the breath away:

Sometimes I sit up in the darkness

And watch my baby as she sleeps.

Then I climb in bed and hold her tight

I just lay there awake in the middle of the night

Thinking about the wreck on the highway.

The River is about time,” Springsteen said as he brought the set to a close. “You realize you have a limited amount of time to do your work, raise your family, do something good.”

The River is Springsteen’s rock opera of life.

A sequential presentation of an album is not simply a gimmick. It is a real reminder of the beauty of musicians curating a collection of songs that play off each other. “Wreck on the Highway” works better with “Ramrod” still echoing in the head.

The best of these songs are driven not by gasoline engines of “Ramrod,” but by the fragility of the characters. Some audience members elevated the communal feeling of the title track by holding up their phones with the flashlight app shining.

When The River was first released, if you really wanted to show that kind of appreciation for a song, you burned your fingers. But those days are gone, aren’t they? I remember reading years ago about how Springsteen thinking about producer Phil Spector’s idea of an album’s “four corners.” The first and last songs on the first side, flip it over, the first and last songs on the second side.

It’s an appreciation for a cohesive set of themes and images and sounds and album-cover art that’s been discarded in this digital age of fans downloading hit singles and ignoring the rest of the music. Such selective listening of a musician’s work is like skipping most of that ponderous Moby-Dick and reading only the section where Ahab harpoons the whale. Yes, you would think, Ahab’s perseverance paid off.

But the whale sunk the ship!

I apologize for not issuing a spoiler alert there for anyone who’s not read Moby-Dick. But the point being, an album heard in its entirety is a statement of where the artist was at that point in time. And perhaps where you were as well.

JSPEVAK@Gannett.com

____________________________________

The SPL Rocks!

Prego che tu stia danzando con San Pietro alle porte perlacee del cielo





Pulled up to my house today
Came and took my little girl away!
Giants Stadium 8/28/03



Oats

Attachments

Images (1)
  • blobid0
Original Post
Post
×
×
×
×
Link copied to your clipboard.
×
×