suspended in our masquerade: bruce springsteen & the e st. band, frank erwin center, austin, texas
To see Bruce Springsteen - who will turn 60 this year - live in concert is to call into question the intensity of your life: what have you been doing? Are you committed to it? Are you so committed to it that you’ll push yourself and your colleagues to the breaking point every night for forty years? No?
That’s what, in part, keeps the whole Bruce shtick from being laughable: it would take someone truly small and mean-spirited (not to mention delusional) to feel superior to Bruce Springsteen in the middle of his show. You can’t maintain it. He’ll overwhelm you with the first few bars of “Badlands”. You could try to be cooler than all the aging joyous white dorks around you, but you paid for tickets too. You’re one of them.
We were all out in force on Sunday night at the Frank Erwin center in Austin, Texas, and it was all silly, it felt silly beforehand and in retrospect and any time you could pull away for a second to think, but it doesn’t feel silly when you’re in the arena with Bruce, singing “The night is dark but the sidewalk’s bright/And lined with the light of the living” and meaning it, man.
Also helping to make it all seem less frivolous is the fact that the era and the mood Bruce has always been singing about is actually here now, in a way that it maybe has never been in his career. A Springsteen concert is always powerful, but there’s a little extra resonance now in some of the lines from “Seeds” or “Johnny 99” (I had debts no honest man could pay/The bank was holdin’ my mortgage and they was takin’ my house away) …or at any rate the audience feels there should be; it’s still a little blurry whether Bruce is about a romantic notion of hardscrabble America or about the real thing.
But again, that kind of critical nitpicking feels sour in the face of this man’s energy: how on earth does he do it? He’s a total ham; the jittery shoulder shrugs, the hip shakes, the audience callouts, every pause and pose and strut are all played to maximum theatrical effect, and yet there’s also a feeling of overwhelming sincerity to the whole thing. He looks, onstage, both like a professional on top of his game, and like a conduit for something holy. He plays the preacher only a little bit tongue in cheek, and some of the fans would readily handle snakes or speak in tongues.
His band, meanwhile, looks exhausted. They look like normal humans trying to play at Bruce’s intensity late into their 50’s, which is basically impossible. I thought Max Weinberg was going to stroke.
Anyway: what else is there to say about Bruce Springsteen that hasn’t been said a thousand times? He has the best “1-2-3-4” in touring rock and roll, and I say the second best ever (Ramones). Maybe he’s not as important for every American to see as, say, the Grand Canyon, but he’s a phenomenon; even if you can’t stand the whole scene, just as a student of life you’re falling down on the job if you don’t get out and see the man in concert.
Here he is, not from Sunday, but from a Zevon tribute:
April 7th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
Very well put…I had the same experience in Phoenix 2 nights before you.
April 9th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
[...] Click here to go to TBT to check Bruce Springsteen’s cover of Warren Zevon’s “My Ride’s Here” [...]