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After going to New Orleans, I swore to myself I would never see this tour again. Was completely blown away in NOLA ? the show felt alive, vital, fragile and strong. The faces on the musicians were full of wonder and mission ? rising up with the music and delivering it to a crowd mixed in Bruce e street culture and new Orleans gumbo ? singing to a city in true need of salvation. The words were important and they got under everyone?s skin ? City of Ruins and When the Saints Come Marching In. It was the unfinished quality and passion that drove the day. And it was timeless and incredible.


So yesterday I found myself in Los Angeles for work ? and going against my promise, went over to the Greek. It was a beautiful night and the Greek is a wonderful venue. The crowd was very un-LA ?they were up in their seats ? singing loud ? on cue. No one left for one minute until the end (that was the most un-LA of all, stacked parking does make an early exit impossible). And yet, what they saw was so different from where this tour started. Bruce is obsessed with tightening and tightening his work until it loses all sense of spontaneity. Each lick, each note, each ending all perfect. If he fucks up a lyric, or plays one new song that is supposed to replace the mission of a night of great musicians making LIVE music. This show is great, but it is starting to feel canned, just like the reunion shows slipped into caricature. It is such a shame that each night cannot be a new adventure musically. Bruce?s anger and passion are now a fake smile ? okay maybe a real smile, maybe he is having the time of his life ? but these songs need the authenticity he brought to New Orleans and cannot stand up to the perfected anthem delivery he has now settled into. I don?t want to see Bruce Springsteen smiling on a big video screen with all perfectly bleached teeth!

Pete Seeger ? whether you liked him or not ? brought a sense of urgency to the music everytime he got out there ? whether one of the thousands of benefits he did for crowds of dozens or millions. He could come off as alittle too sincere and over the top ? granted ? but he was (and continues to be) the real deal.

Bruce is posing in front of these songs right now ? great musicians, brilliant arrangements, inspired set list ? but the core is missing and it shows.

We all do go to Bruce shows for the connection he promises ? with him, with ourselves, and with the music. What he had in April, and what you know he has inside ? seems to be slipping away on stage as this tour plays out.

In the meantime, does anyone have a good seat for MSG?
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It's always been like that. He's always tightened things, dropped moves and patter he didn't feel 'worked' and kept and repeated things that got a good reaction, until, by the end, it's "The ___________ Tour: The Broadway Show."

Just gotta deal, I guess. That's pretty much how it works for any performer or anyone doing a job. Repetition brings streamlining and the death of spontanaiety. Unless you have a drug or drinking habit.
I guess I'm in that category of people who like it when bands practice and the show gets tight. Call me crazy. And having seen the show in Virginia and heard New Orleans, I really don't think it's become sterile. For God's sake, he's got 20 people up there with him--it's not like he can turn this aircraft carrier around on a dime. I'm frankly surprised the show is as spontaneous as it is--and it's about as spontaneous as any of his band tours. Sure, the solo tour ultimately became pretty freewheeling (it wasn't at this stage of the tour), some of those "interesting" versions were awful, amateurish renditions of bad songs.
this is the review from the LA Times today. I think this writer says the sames thing I was trying to - maybe alittle more eloquently. This is a tough one though, because he is on the right road, and his heart is in the right place. After seeing Leno video this am - felt he was fighting the good fight despite all I wrote.


http://www.calendarlive.com/music/cl-et-springsteen7jun07,0,7322869.story?coll=cl-home-top-blurb-right
POP MUSIC REVIEW

More than just plain folk
Springsteen takes his new folk mission seriously: We (even in Hollywood) shall overcome inhibitions and raise voices together.

By Ann Powers
Times Staff Writer

June 7, 2006

With a perfect half-moon shining down and 17 able hands behind him, Bruce Springsteen was trying Monday to get the Hollywood power elite to sing. Cracking wise about white stretch Hummers parked outside, Springsteen challenged the screen stars, media folk and lucky others at the Greek Theatre to let down their cool and join in some tunes they'd learned in summer camp.

The crowd certainly would have bellowed its lungs out at an E Street Band show, full of Springsteen hits. But this visit offered different fare, and the fans needed cajoling. "It won't hurt. We'll guide ya," Springsteen said, leading his Seeger Sessions Band into the classic fiddle tune "Old Dan Tucker." After a pallid chorus, he sighed. "That's pathetic," he said. "But it'll have to do."

Getting the crowd to sing is the folk musician's imperative, and this tour celebrates Springsteen's year of pure folk. Rock's favorite showman has often vacationed in protest singer territory, but only now has he made an album honoring the legacy he's mined. "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions" features songs popularized by the great balladeer Pete Seeger, many so familiar that, as Springsteen said Monday, "you sort of stop being able to hear them." A seasoned, New York-based ensemble helped Springsteen turn these modest, rich tunes into typically grand razzle-dazzle.

Monday's 20-song set made room for everything from Preservation Hall-style jazz to Western swing, zydeco, Southern gospel, jump blues, country blues, conjunto, classic country and boogie-woogie, all adding up to Springsteen's own big-band rock 'n' roll. It was a history lesson you could dance to, and the audience delighted in the game.

Springsteen too seemed thrilled, immersing in such time-honored greats as "Erie Canal" and finding life in new arrangements of several of his own hits, including a Southern rock take on "Atlantic City" and an Appalachian version of "If I Should Fall Behind," which, as usual, featured an intimate duet with his wife, Patti Scialfa.

Scialfa (and, very briefly, guest keyboardist Roy Bittan) is the new group's only E Street Band holdover; the rest are mostly New York scene veterans or folk experimentalists. Standouts included the fleet-fingered banjo player Greg Liszt and the charismatic singer-songwriter Marc Anthony Thompson, here on backing vocals and guitar. But the whole group hardly missed a beat.

Like the chrome-polished E Street Band, these players got loose with total precision, executing the songs' twists and turns while putting on a show of funny dance moves and excited mugging. And the instrumentation ? including pedal steel, stand-up bass, washboard and a full horn section ? was a history lesson in itself.

The party numbers pleased Springsteen's devotees. Yet two of the night's most affecting moments were quiet ones. Springsteen's bare-bones rendition of the Seeger-penned antiwar song "Bring 'Em Home" spoke to the situation in Iraq without a whiff of grandstanding, while a shimmering, churchy version of "When the Saints Go Marching In," featuring beautiful vocals from Scialfa and Thompson, acted as a touching elegy to a Katrina-felled New Orleans.

The only thing lacking from this wide-ranging show was the feeling created by actual folk music, the kind Seeger plays. Classic folk's high points don't happen at concerts at all but among workers or protesters whose raised voices lend miraculous strength. The contrast Monday was most sharply felt when Springsteen sang "We Shall Overcome," which he calls "the most important political protest song of all time." As he intoned, not one voice from the crowd joined his. The song, so powerful as a tool of social change, felt strangely dishonored when not shared.

Folk relies on the feeling that the audience genuinely stands equal to the performer; that singing along matters more than the spectacle onstage. Springsteen can strum an acoustic guitar, but he'll always be the Boss ? a rock star. When people sing at his behest, they revel in a dream his music creates. Folk music, as Seeger practices it, poses a very different ideal, grounded in diligent community engagement. It's the difference between "we shall overcome" and "I'm goin' out tonight. I'm gonna rock that joint."

But that dream's great too ? and in a song such as Springsteen's own "Open All Night," which bears that line, it can bring a great sense of freedom. Ultimately that's how the Boss got his people to sing Monday. He made his history lesson fun. "I'm impressed," he said, grinning, by the evening's fourth or fifth singalong. Even that power player Tom Hanks was spotted singing along in the front.
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Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
[]The contrast Monday was most sharply felt when Springsteen sang "We Shall Overcome," which he calls "the most important political protest song of all time." As he intoned, not one voice from the crowd joined his. The song, so powerful as a tool of social change, felt strangely dishonored when not shared.[/]

Talk about missing the point. His version of WSO is deliberately powerful and resolute in its quietness. Seeing him perform it, I was happy everybody else shut up for five minutes.
Springsteen & The Seeger Session Band faces the same problem that Springsteen & 1992-3 Tour Band faced.....they have not had enough time to build up a large live archive of songs. The 1992-3 Tour band improved as that tour went on....as I'm sure this one will too. But they'll never match the library that the E Street Band could draw upon during the 1973-88 era. Even on the Greetings Tour Springsteen had musicians that (excepting Clarence) he'd been playing, jamming and living with regularly for several years. That is something that Springsteen no longer has, even with the current E Street Band.

Some things cannot be faked.
[]One show a tour and you wont get bored.

MOre to life than Bruce. [/]

I disagree, check out the last three tours. By the last leg, 25% of the material in the set was different, on some nights, that percent was much higher.

For instance, I saw the first rehearsal show in AP for this tour, since then, quite a few new songs have been added to the set. Hell, during the last week he has added 3 (AC, Further, Long time).

So, catching a few shows on each tour, especially spaced apart can still be enjoyable. I can't wait for the Philly show tomorrow to see how the band has progressed.

As far as 92/93, I saw about 10 shows, and the only keeper was the benefit in the meadowlands (Clarence's visit). The rest were not even close to any other tour, but that show was strong.
[]Yeah, I think so. But we really should ask chance, since he's the only one who actually listens to those boots. [/]
Save for the 'Everybody Needs Somebody to Love' bit on Roll of the Dice, chance prefers the 92 stuff, so as to whether they got better or not is a question lost on him. Though it should be pointed out that the man had to tell his drummer when to play the whole damn tour.
The last show of the HT/LT tour was excellent considering it was the other band. Bruce came to play and gave it his all that night.

The other show I saw, the last night of a Meadowlands stand was good too (August '92?). I know it's on Brucebase, but I'm guessing there were around eight songs in the second encore, including an appearance by Steve on Glory Days.
Stipped of my rand.
We?re spoilt, that ?s what it is.
The average "fan" goes to one show per tour, has the time of his/her life and files these emotions under "Bruce Tour 20XX".
We, the crazy ones, the people who collect boots, join the queue 12 hours before the gates open, we want paradise 10 times per tour, we want Bruce to be different every night, we want 20 new (and rare) songs out of 28 played, we want new stories, we want new jokes ...
We?re spoilt ...
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