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September 30, 2007
In Love With Pop, Uneasy With the World
By A. O. SCOTT
Asbury Park, N.J.
IT was the last day of summer, but on the boardwalk here it seemed more like a perfect morning in early July: the Atlantic Ocean sparkled under a cloudless sky; the humid air was soothed by a soft, salty breeze. I looked down the empty beach, past the souvenir shops and snack bars with their fresh paint and new green awnings, toward the proud Victorian hulk of the old Casino, and felt that I had walked into a Bruce Springsteen song. (Oh, I dont know. Maybe Fourth of July, Asbury Park. Or is that too obvious?)
The feeling, no less potent for being self-induced, had been with me all morning. Bright and early, me and my girl my wife of nearly two decades, that is had let the screen door slam, dropped off the kids at school and set out on the open road, blowing through the E-ZPass lanes on the Garden State Parkway in our Volvo station wagon. We had an advance copy of Mr. Springsteens new album, Magic, in the CD slot, and most of his back catalog in reserve on the iPod. And now we were driving down Kingsley, figuring wed get a latte. One more chance to make it real. Tramps like us, baby!
Our purpose was not to fantasize but rather to observe the E Street Band in rehearsal, and then to hear what the man himself had to say about the new record, the coming tour and whatever else was on his mind. Magic is, musically, one of the most upbeat, accessible records he has made, even as its themes and stories make it one of his most political. Once again he is hitting the road as a presidential election heats up.
I like coming out on those years, he would tell me later, when we sat down to talk in a backstage dressing room after the rehearsal. Whatever small little bit we can do, thats a good time to do it.
At an age when most rock n rollers, if theyre still alive, have become either tributes to or parodies of their earlier selves, Mr. Springsteen seems to have settled into an enviable groove, with new musical forms to explore and an existing body of work that never seems to get old, with plenty to say and an audience that hangs on his every word.
In which as if it werent already obvious I include myself. Ive been listening to Bruce Springsteen for a long time, but I cant pretend that he provided the soundtrack for my youth. I spent my teenage years in the thrall of punk rock and its various aftermaths and came to Springsteen late, past the stage of life when his great anthems of romance, rebellion and escape might have had their most direct impact. As a result, I associate his work with the sorrows and satisfactions of adulthood; its music to grow up to, not out of.
Mr. Springsteens best songs, it seems to me, are about compromise and stoicism; disappointment and faith; work, patience and resignation. They are also, frequently even the ones he wrote when he was still in his 20s about nostalgia, about the desire to recapture those fleeting moments of intensity and possibility we associate with being young.
Moments that tend, not coincidentally, to crystallize within a certain kind of popular song. A song, lets say, like Girls in Their Summer Clothes, which arrives smack in the middle of Magic and which the E Street Band was in the middle of playing when my wife and I tiptoed through the doors of the Asbury Park Convention Hall. It was a little after 10; the band was about an hour into its morning rehearsal, preparing for a tour of North America and Europe that kicks off on Tuesday in Hartford.
The Convention Hall is a battered, pocket-size arena where, as a teenager, Mr. Springsteen saw bands like the Who and the Doors. This morning it was filled with a shimmery, summery sound, as if we had traveled back 40 years into the mid-60s sonic landscape of Phil Spector, Brian Wilson and the Byrds. Steve van Zandt was strumming a 12-string guitar, and the vocal harmonies, the chiming keyboards, Clarence Clemonss saxophone and Soozie Tyrells violin combined to produce a lush orchestral cushion for Mr. Springsteens voice, which swooned through a lyric as unabashedly romantic as the songs title.
I wanted one thing on the record that was the perfect pop universe, Mr. Springsteen said, once the band had wandered off and he had finished an early lunch of granola with fresh fruit and soy milk. It was two days before his 58th birthday, and he looked trimmer and tanner than he had the last time Id seen him, which was on the JumboTron video screen at Giants Stadium a few years back. You know, that day when its all right there; its the world that only exists in pop songs, and once in a while you stumble on it.
Not that Girls in Their Summer Clothes is untouched by melancholy. Its narrator, after all, stands and watches as the girls of the title pass me by. Its the longing, the unrequited longing for that perfect world, Mr. Springsteen continued. Pop is funny. Its a tease. Its an important one, but its a tease, and therein resides its beauty and its joke.
And much of Magic, on first hearing, seems to unfold in a similar spirit. There is a brightness of sound and a lightness of touch that are not quite like anything else Mr. Springsteen has done recently. In the past five years he has released four albums of original material, a zigzag through new and familiar styles and idioms. The Rising (2002) brought the E Street Band back into the studio after a long hiatus (their sound updated by the producer Brendan OBrien) and answered the trauma of 9/11 with the defiant, redemptive roar of solid, down-the-middle rock. With Devils and Dust (2005) Mr. Springsteen picked up the thread of Western stories and acoustic ballads that stretched back through other non-E Street projects like The Ghost of Tom Joad and Nebraska (as well as some parts of The River). The Seeger Sessions, released last year, was an old-time old-lefty hootenanny, with a big, unruly jug band rollicking through spirituals, union songs and Dust Bowl ballads.
All of those discs were infused with Mr. Springsteens bedrock populism, but none was quite what you would call a pop record. Pop, though, is the term he and his band mates use, again and again, to describe Magic. Mr. Van Zandt, who has been playing and arguing about music with Mr. Springsteen for 40 years (scholars cite Nov. 3, 1967, as the date of their first meeting), noted that in the past Mr. Springsteens more tuneful, playful compositions tended not to make it onto albums.
It was nice on this one to start to be a little bit more inclusive, he said in a telephone interview a few days after my visit to Asbury Park, with a little bit more of the poppier side of things, without losing any of the integrity, or any of the high standards. That was a nice surprise, a nice change of pace to include those things and integrate them into the album, rather than having them be fun to record and then cast them aside.
For his part, Mr. Sprinsteen said that in writing the songs for Magic, he had experienced a reinfatuation with pop music. I went back to some forms that I either hadnt used previously or hadnt used a lot, which was actual pop productions, he said. I wrote a lot of hooks. That was just the way that the songs started to write themselves, I think because I felt free enough that I wasnt afraid of the pop music. In the past I wanted to make sure that my music was tough enough for the stories I was going to tell.
The paradox of Magic may be that some of its stories are among the toughest he has told. The album is sometimes a tease but rarely a joke. The title track, for instance, comes across as a seductive bit of carnival patter, something you might have heard on the Asbury Park boardwalk in the old days. A magician, his voice whispery and insinuating in a minor key, lures you in with descriptions of his tricks that grow more sinister with each verse. (Ive got a shiny saw blade/All I needs a volunteer.) Trust none of what you hear/And less of what you see, he warns. And the songs refrain This is what will be grows more chilling as you absorb the rest of the albums nuances and shadows.
You can always trust what you hear on a Bruce Springsteen record (irony, he notes, is not something hes known for), but in this case it pays to listen closely, to make note of the darkness, so to speak, that hovers at the edge of the shiny hooks and harmonies. I took these forms and this classic pop language and I threaded it through with uneasiness, Mr. Springsteen said.
And while the songs on Magic characteristically avoid explicit topical references, there is no mistaking that the source of the unease is, to a great extent, political. The title track, Mr. Springsteen explained, is about the manufacture of illusion, about the Bush administrations stated commitment to creating its own reality.
This is a record about self-subversion, he told me, about the way the country has sabotaged and corrupted its ideals and traditions. And in its own way the album itself is deliberately self-subverting, troubling its smooth, pleasing surfaces with the blunt acknowledgment of some rough, unpleasant facts.
Magic picks up where The Rising left off and takes stock of what has happened in this country since Sept. 11. Then, the collective experiences of grief and terror were up front. Now those same emotions lurk just below the surface, which means that the catharsis of rock n roll uplift is harder to come by. The key words of The Rising were hope, love, strength, faith, and they were grounded in a collective experience of mourning. There is more loneliness in Magic, and, notwithstanding the relaxed pop mood, a lot less optimism.
The stories told in songs like Gypsy Biker and The Devils Arcade are vignettes of private loss suffered by the lovers and friends of soldiers whose lives were shattered or ended in Iraq. The record is a tallying of cost and of loss, Mr. Springsteen said. Thats the burden of adulthood, period. But thats the burden of adulthood in these times, squared.
In conversation, Mr. Springsteen has a lot to say about what has happened in America over the last six years: Disheartening and heartbreaking. Not to mention enraging is how he sums it up. But his most direct and powerful statement comes, as you might expect, onstage. It is not anything he says or sings, but rather a piece of musical dramaturgy, the apparently simple, technical matter of shifting from one song to the next.
On the Convention Hall stage, the band handled the new material as deftly as the chestnuts after 35 years together, communication is pretty much effortless pausing to work out an occasional kink or adjust the sound mix. But they must have gone over the segue from The Rising to their next number at least a half-dozen times.
Youve got to let that chord sustain. Everybody! Mr. Springsteen urged. It cant die down.
The guitarists had the extra challenge of keeping the sound going while changing instruments, a series of baton-relay sprints for the crew whose job was to assist with the switch, until a dissonant organ ring came in to signal a change of key and the thunderous opening of Last to Die. Its not much of an exaggeration to say that Mr. Springsteens take on the post-9/11 history of the United States can be measured in the space between the choruses of those two songs. The audience is hurled from a rousing exhortation (Come on up to the rising) to a grim, familiar question: Wholl be the last to die for a mistake?
Thats why we had to get that very right today, he said later. You saw us working on it. That thing has to come down like the worlds falling on you, that first chord. Its got to screech at the end of The Rising, and then its got to crack, rumble. The whole night is going to turn on that segue. Thats what were up there for right now, that 30 seconds.
But the night does not end there. Onstage, Last to Die is followed, as it is on the album, by a song called Long Walk Home. In the first verse, the speaker travels to some familiar hometown spots and experiences an alienation made especially haunting by the language in which he describes it: I looked into their faces/They were all rank strangers to me. That curious, archaic turn of phrase rank strangers evokes an eerie old mountain lament of the same title, recorded by the Stanley Brothers.
In that particular song a guy comes back to his town and recognizes nothing and is recognized by nothing, Mr. Springsteen said. The singer in Long Walk Home, thats his experience. His world has changed. The things that he thought he knew, the people who he thought he knew, whose ideals he had something in common with, are like strangers. The world that he knew feels totally alien. I think thats whats happened in this country in the past six years.
And so the songs images of a vanished small town life (The diner was shuttered and boarded/With a sign that just said gone ) turn into metaphors, the last of which is delivered with the clarity and force that has distinguished Mr. Springsteens best writing:
My father said Son, were
lucky in this town
Its a beautiful place to be born.
It just wraps its arms around you
Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone.
You know that flag
flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, and what well do
And what we wont
Its gonna be a long walk home.
Thats the end of the story were telling on a nightly basis, Mr. Springsteen said. Because thats the way its supposed to be. And thats not the way it is right now.
www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/arts/music/30scot.html?_r=1&ref=music&oref=slogin
'F*ck me swinging, it's all about the hare!'
