The Boss in Buffalo
Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live at HSBC Arena, Buffalo, NY, October 7, 2002.
by Samuele Pardini
The first day of fall in Buffalo welcomed Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band. It was the last show of the first leg of the “Barnstorming Tour” in support of The Rising, their best album since Born to Run, a week before they crossed the Atlantic for a few concerts in Western Europe. Fans began to arrive to the arena around five o’clock, while Springsteen was backstage giving an interview to an Italian journalist, to whom he talked of his Italian heritage, his Catholicism (“once a Catholic always a Catholic one could say” he told the interviewer), and to whom he explained his point of view on the current political situation, which he made clear to the audience towards the end of the show.
These days there are basically two types of people who attend his concerts. The first are the true fans, his second family. They are usually in their thirties, forties, and fifties, following the main pattern of his career’s success, Born to Run-The River-Born in the USA. A few younger people show up here and there, despite the $75 cost of tickets, which— as .Princeton University economics professor Alan Kreuger. explained in The New York Times of October 17— is not at all outrageous considering the current times, the monopoly of ticket distribution, and the absence of a commercial sponsor,. Even so, I think the price alienates a lot of young kids who could be interested in seeing the show, especially considering that they hear the new music through the massive commercial campaign that is promoting The Rising, included numerous appearances on the Today Show, Letterman, VH1, and MTV.
The second type are those who have to be at the concert because it’s The Event in town. They don’t care who’s performing, if it’s Springsteen or Andrea Bocelli. They just want to be there to show their face. What the two types of fans share is the color of their skin. They are all white. Despite the fact that, aside from the acoustic The Ghost of Tom Joad, all of Springsteen’s albums since Tunnel of Love are deeply black, a mix of blues and gospel with only some veins of country, at least 95% of the audience is white, and maybe more than that. I believe it’s a perfect mirror of the comatose conditions of the radio stations all across the country, incidentally the subject of Tom Petty’s new wonderful album, The Last DJ. They are divided per musical genre so that they can target their audiences according to the interests of their commercial sponsors. “Sell It and They Will Come,” right?
The show was scheduled to start at 7 :30, but, as usual, it was 8 :20 before the band climbed the stairs to take possession of the stage. One by one, the eight musicians took their positions. The back line: Danny Federici on the organ and accordion; Max Weinberg on the drums; Roy Bittan on the piano; Soozie Tyrell, the newest member of the most powerful rock & roll band, on violin; Gary W. Tallent on bass, his look perfect as his air (did he ever have a bad hair day?). The front line was composed, from left to right watching the stage, by Clarence Clemons on the saxophone, Nils Lofgren on guitars, Steve “Silvio Dante” Van Zandt on guitar and mandolin, Patti Scialfa on guitar and vocals. The director of the orchestra entered just a few seconds after them, guitar in his hands like a sword. He took the center of the stage and briefly saluted the audience.
They all wore pretty much what they used to wear during the Darkness Tour except for Van Zandt (does anybody know where he buys those trousers and boots?), only a little more casual and composed. They know they’re not “that young anymore.” They’re all husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and they live a comfortable life. On the other hand, you can’t do differently when you begin with a song like “The Rising.” You have to be serious and honest if you want to sing in front of 20.000 people “can’t feel nothing but this chain that binds me,” distant sounds of a forgotten manifesto and of chain gangs now hidden in the ghettos of any city and in the newly built huge prisons. Let alone when you continue with “Lonesome Day” (“a little revenge and this too shall pass... deceit and betrayal’s bitter fruit/it’s hard to swallow, come time to pay”), “Darkness on the Edge of Town” (which the son of Mrs. Adele Zirilli performs any time he comes to megacatholic Buffalo), and “Further On Up The Road.” The first is no longer a mix of “Lucky Town” meets Joe Ely “Upon the Bridge,” but—because of Brendan O’Brien, the talented producer of “The Rising”— a powerful rock song with harsh guitars. “Darkness” is a classic, played more like the gospel “accents” of the 1992-93 tour, whereas the other three songs are new. I saw this show three times before Buffalo, and I can guarantee you their execution is now perfect.
And yet, there is a problem with the singing of the new songs, which Springsteen avoids only in “Into the Fire.” He invests them with all his physical sheer energy, body and soul one with the guitar, but, unlike in the recorded versions, he tends to loose control of his voice. He makes the same mistake that Sam Cooke, clearly his singing model in the album, made in Live at Harlem Club. He forces his voice too much. Thus the balance between the music and the voice that makes the record a masterpiece is lost.
What is not lost in the musical execution, however, is the message of the lyrics. Ever since The River, with the exception of Human Touch, Springsteen tried more and more to write stories rather than poetic songs. The epic provincialism of the Jersey shore has been replaced by stories with universal themes that could take place anywhere in America or in the world (indeed, there’s almost no American geography in The Rising). The first five lines of The River are a spectacular example of what a great writer is all about. He uses the pen like Faulkner, as if it were a camera with which to film the action from behind a car, as in the video of “Atlantic City,” where the storyteller is the camera itself. In the live dimension, however, with the movements of his body and especially with a myriad of different facial expressions, he opens up the texts, he enrich them. Thus you understand that he would have written these songs even if September 11 hadn’t happened, contrary to what a vicious, arrogant, and offending (for those who died that day, not for Springsteen) reviewer of the album wrote (actually, a few of the songs were written before the attacks).
The rage, the smiles, the sadness, the courage, the respect, and the daily heroism that those expressions articulate don’t come from an abstract empathy, but from the awareness of where the value of work, first of all, and then of everything that goes with it: Love, honor, friendship, loyalty, justice comes from. That is to say, as Bob Dylan once told a stupefied journalist, from waking up in the morning and starting a new day. And indeed, there’s a lot of Dylan in these songs, such as in “Into the Fire, where the line of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” that reads “it’s getting dark too dark to see,” becomes, sadly, “it was dark too dark to see.”
This is the reason why he can afford to write about that day and what that means, especially for certain people more directly affected by it, and still be credible. Not because he was born in the USA, a fact that hundreds of millions of people can claim. That is why he can sing “Empty Sky” and “You’re Missing,” the next two songs of the show. He performed the first in an acoustic version with the help of Patti Scialfa, the second in a semi-acoustic version, a way to make them more intimate in a big arena, I think, and also to take a breath after such an energetic start.
Then he launched into the most joyous song he composed since “Hungry Heart,” a song that sooner or later has to be released as a single, “Waiting On A Sunny Day.” It is, so to speak, his long due public salute to John Mellencamp, who once said, with his usual honesty, that “without Bruce none of us would be here,” meaning himself, Tom Petty, U2, REM, Social Distortion, Steve Earle, Public Enemy (yes indeed), Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, Pete Yorn, Marah and many others.
It was at this point that he started leaving the center of the stage and began to go around it, jumping like a kangaroo, pretty good stuff for a 53-year-old man. By this point the whole arena was on its feet, except for the woman sitting beside the friend who came with me to the show, who I think was made of marble, though at least a smile appeared on her face. After “Sunny Day” another powerful block of songs came, all guitar oriented. “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch),” “No Surrender,” the harsh “World Apart” to remind us the cold materiality of facts and how difficult is the communication between different cultures despite all our media (or maybe it’s because of them?), which was immediately blown away by “Badlands,” the Internationale of all those at the margins and of those who believe in and fight for a better world. And by a perfect version of “She’s the One” and by “Mary’s Place,” another track from the new album, during which he presented the band.
It’s “E Street Shuffle” thirty years later, a summer night on the Jersey shore, long hair, “barefoot girls sitting on the hood of a Dodge,” a beer or a joint in your hand, maybe both, young kids dancing’ in the streets, and some dude racing in King’s Avenue and Ocean Street, “the circuit,” with his “ ’69 Chevy with a 396, fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor.” In short, everything they don’t do in California.
He got back his guitar for the next two songs, “Countin’ on a Miracle” and “Tougher Than The Rest,” whose titles I’m afraid will be very contemporary in a few weeks as well as “Lost in The Flood,” which he performed after them alone at the piano. A wonderful gift, especially appreciated by the old fans (it’s from Greetings, 1972) that preceded the most beautiful song of the entire show, “Into the Fire,” the ballad written for the firefighters who died trying to rescue their fellow human beings on September 11, thus making their partners widows and their children orphans. If you want to know why he is The Boss, you only have to see him singing this song, almost a peaceful military march. It reaches the musical pitch not because of Springsteen or the band per se, but because of the vocal performance of Patti Scialfa, truly beautiful and touching. In a song that talks about climbing stairs to get to hell, she takes you even higher, to heaven.
It was the last tune before the two encores that began just a few seconds after they left the stage. The first started with a revisited “Dancin’ in the Dark,” which with The Swingin’ Medallions’ “Double Shot of My Baby Love,” Mellencamp’s “Jack & Diane,” Madonna’s “Like A Virgin,” and Petty’s “Free Fallin’ ” is the only real great pop song ever since Dion (ALL the rest is trash you can’t even recycle)*, “Ramrod,” where he proved that he can’t dance but he can definitely act, and “Born To Run” with all the lights out and the audience in delirium, a pandemonium.
Less than a minute and they were back on stage for the second encore. They opened with “My City of Ruins,” the song Ani DiFranco can’t write, dedicated to the people of food bank of Western New York that Springsteen invited everyone to help financially on their way out of the arena where they had set some stands, and followed by his “public service announcement.” A few, simple words to warn of the threat impending upon the civil rights and liberties at the moment and of the peril of going off to war without having the necessary information of the reasons for such an extreme act, after which Max Weinberg detonated his drums leading the band all the way into the “steel wheels singin’ ” of “Land of Hope and Dreams” and the appendix of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready.” Everybody thought it was the end of the show. But it was not.
As the lights stayed out, they all started looking around the cheerful arena, walking around the stage, and finally they embraced their instruments for “Working on the Highway,” what Springsteen called “the last dance” before strumming his acoustic guitar while spitting up some water he just drank, and then moving like Elvis. As the song led towards the end, only Weinberg and Bittan remained in their positions. The rest of the band gathered in circle at the center of the stage, though distant from the central microphone. Clemons with a dashboard, Federici with the accordion, Silvio Dante with his mandolin, Tyrell with her violin, Lofgren and Scialfa with their acoustic guitars, Tallent with his bass softly played, finally smiling. They could have been a bluegrass band in the middle of a midwest prairie, playing, dancing, and laughing, a party in an open field.
Maybe because at the moment I’m writing on The Grapes of Wrath, I thought of the scene in the book when the migrant workers have their usual Saturday night party in the government camp, the only moment of joy in the middle of a brutal life. They all dance and play, their consumed bodies now vital and close one another, men and women and children. They find some dignity they thought lost forever and they reproduce the social ties they lost when they’d been forced out of their homes and towns by the Eastern capital, the banks that “breathe profit.” When the vigilantes come with their weapons to provoke a riot in the camp, so to have an excuse to close it, the Okies, all together, find the courage and the moral strength to oppose them and send them back, with intelligence and without violence. And maybe that’s the way to break that chain that binds us.
*I said POP, not ROCK; pop was over the day The Who came to America and Garage finally took over, which was good, since all that California trash a la Jefferson Airplane simply sucks, not to mention the unbearable litanies of CSN and Young, paleolithical fossils before they were born, no wonder Young then went heavy electric and finally redeemed himself going on tour with Pearl Jam; in fact, with the exception of a few unreleased tunes from ’78 now on Tracks, there is not one note of garage in Springsteen music, as there is not in Mellencamp apart from 2 tunes in Whenever We Wanted or in Petty after TP & TH and Damn the Torpedoes, indeed already deeply traditional American music revisited on the B side - see Louisiana Rain that closes the album; they all went back to the roots and let the younger bands took over the tradition of garage+punk. See the Seattle Movement - Soundgarden and, of course, Nirvana- or Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine and others. U2 tried to bring pop back in 97, big failure; in England they consider the Wham great pop, and I’m gonna be the next Pope.
