E Streeters continuing saga

Dear Tim,
I too have blown hot and cold with Max Weinberg – though mostly cold I’d have to say. And I would say the same about Springsteen himself. Come to think of it, this has been an ongoing thirty-year issue for me. When Springsteen first arrived on the scene in the 1970s as John Hammond’s next anointed golden boy, I was unimpressed. After all, Dylan had come out with Blood On The Tracks, which struck me with the force of revelation, because the lyric-writing on that record – beginning with the astonishing opening track – raised the possibility that rock songs could truly achieve the emotional resonance and complexity of great short fiction. (Unfortunately, I have since come to believe that that incredible album was a false dawn – a swan song for that kind of songwriting – and not, as I had hoped, the beginning of an era in which anything was possible in rock.) By contrast, Springsteen’s early, self-consciously Dylanesque (and carnivalesque) lyric writing seemed like (yet another) return to the hit or miss (though brilliant nevertheless) amphetamine wordplay of Dylan’s mid-1960s work. In addition, I thought the playing (and particularly the drumming, though I forget the guy’s name) on Springsteen’s first album was simply awful. And I became only more unimpressed when, with the advent of Jon Landau, Bruce went on to become the first important rock star to be produced and managed by a rock critic. Part of the problem was that Springsteen was drawing on the same set of influences that I and all the other r&b-based rock musicians I was playing with in those days were drawing on: the gospel-blues continuum that runs from Ray Charles and Sam Cooke to Motown and Stax and then enters rock in a big way with the Band. I immediately picked up on the Levi Stubbs, Rick Danko quality in Springsteen’s voice and the piano-and-organ timbre of his band. But, as often happens with other people who share your influences, I didn’t like the way he was using them, which hardened the resistance in me.
Then came the cult of the Boss, which from my perspective marked the Sinatra phase of Springsteen’s career. To give them credit, there’s a particular way that people from New Jersey exalt a particular type of powerful male identity, and it’s had a strong influence on popular culture in the last fifty years, first with the Chairman of the Board, then with the Boss, and then of course with Tony Soprano (who, in case anybody missed the point, inherited Little Stevie as his sidekick). And I couldn’t wrap myself around that for a minute. By then the E-Street Band was an institution of sorts. What I liked about them was that they sounded like nothing more or less than the loudest bar band in the world. And that, of course, was what I didn’t like about them as well, because everything they played, they played with less nuance – in some cases, much less nuance – than their influences. Basically, the rhythm section sounded as if they were striving in every song to reproduce the feeling you and I and everyone else in the Western World got the first time we heard the monumental groove – that snare drum! – of “Dancing in The Street.” And from my perspective, they never really got there, though I know that many satisfied listeners would disagree.
So I did what any busy, preoccupied person who was raising two kids and trying to sustain a career in the music business would do: I pretty much ignored Springsteen all through the Reagan-Bush years. And then one day I was talking to my writer friend Elizabeth Lesser, who’s a very gentle soul, and I was surprised to hear her talking about how much she liked Springsteen. And I told her I really didn’t get it. And she said that she didn’t get it for a long time either, and she still didn’t like a lot of his early stuff, but had I heard “Tunnel of Love?” Listen to “Tunnel of Love,” she said. She may have meant the whole album, but I took her to mean the song. And a few days later, I did listen to it, in the car, only to find about halfway through that I had tears streaming down my cheeks. Over and over again. Now, to be sure, I was then involved in a twenty-five-year-old relationship that (I was just beginning to realize) was coming apart at the seams. But the song grabbed me with the force – now that I think about it – of “Tangled Up In Blue.” And in that moment, my hard heart softened for Springsteen. It’s not like I went on, or back, to embrace his entire body of work. I still find a great deal of it very hard to take, all that blue-collar angst, and the constant reappearances of his “daddy” (has he ever mentioned his mother in a song? I mean, just once? You can tell by that alone that he isn’t Jewish, despite what some people thought at first). And I have little patience with his whole Tom Joad persona, which he first unveiled in some of the other tracks on Tunnel of Love. And I still feel that the E-Street Band plays with all the finesse one might expect from a bunch of guys who hang around the meat locker at Satriale’s Pork Store. The ham-fisted Max most of all. But for me, Springsteen has become the sort of artist who can occasionally stop me in my tracks, and there are not many of them left in the field of rock. His masterpiece, in my opinion, is The Rising – the whole CD. I think it’s probably the most powerful and meaningful artistic response to 9/11 that I have heard to date, and I was stupefied by his ability to take that on and pull that off. Significantly, however, it was the one album he had made in a very long time on which he allowed someone else to produce. And that points to the thing that you were pointing out: the way his control freak nature subverts the potential of his music. Ultimately, the problem with Bruce is a very Jersey sort of thing. He’s the Boss. And he has surrounded himself with musical sycophants. Not that they can’t tease him, and the case of Nils Lofgrin, outplay him. And they occasionally generate effects that surprise both him and themselves. But the pecking order in the band is clear, and the hierarchy of talent in the band is clear, and everybody is ultimately deferring to him. It’s a closed shop, and that’s not a good thing in a group…
–JG