London Calling

Bruce Springsteen & The E-Street Band

London Calling: Live in Hyde Park [DVD] *****

 I wrote the following in June 2009, but have only just got around to posting it here.

It takes a supremely confident band to open a major gig not with one of their greatest or most popular songs, but with a cover.  And not just any cover, but The Clash’s iconic ‘London Calling’.  But that was the decision when Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band took to the stage at the Hard Rock Calling festival in Hyde Park on June 28 2009.  It was a masterful judgement which, from the familiar opening riff had the massive crowd totally on-side and all claiming to live by the river.  The entire concert has been released on a double DVD and it is stunning.  The previous night had seen Springsteen and his band deliver a triumphant performance with their curfew-busting debut at Glastonbury.  There was no sign of tiredness in this band despite that epic performance, and no one who goes to see Springsteen play can ever complain they don’t get their money’s worth.  Despite turning 60 last year, a three hour full-throttle set is still the benchmark for Bruce; there are few pauses between songs – each segues seamlessly into the next, punctuated only by Bruce’s occasional forays into the crowd to meet his people and collect request placards.  He doesn’t just sing his songs, he really works at them, and the sweat pouring from his body and flying from his head when he shakes himself like a damp dog, is testament to the energy, drive and sheer joy of performance.

If many in the crowd at Glastonbury were new to Bruce and E-Street, in Hyde Park he was preaching to the converted.  The crowd react passionately to every cue and stage direction from the Boss and join in with all the chorus responses as if they had been practising for months.  There are plenty of crowd pleasers here.  Despite starting out as promotion for the 2009 album, Working on a Dream, the set list for this and other stages of the world tour drew heavily on the extensive back catalogue, particularly from Darkness on the Edge of Town, Born to Run and Born in the USA, as well as some other cover versions including the eerily resonant Hard Times, Come Again No More, penned by Stephen Foster in 1854 . 

Few artists could get away with the carny antics on stage that Springsteen does; but he knows he is camping things up, whether that is when he goes into the style of a tub-thumping evangelical preacher, when he is channelling Elvis as he mops his brow on a scarf and hands it back, staggering up the stage steps, skipping back and forth across the stage or attempting a hip-swivelling sashay.  His kids probably find it all excruciating, but the crowd recognise the parody and love it.  It’s not all slapstick either, there is something spiritual about the exchange between audience and band, the shared singing at times has a hymn-like quality.  When Bruce spreads his arms in crucifix form, or extends his right hand in that slightly odd gesture he has it is as if he is genuflecting absolution on all (and this is the closest most of this secular crowd get to worship).  He remains a catholic, and religious imagery and iconography are scattered throughout his songs; when he holds his guitar aloft in salute it is hard not to see it as totemic.

This double DVD is riveting for the clarity of production and the revelations of close-up filming.   The band may start out with a set list but much of it gets junked when Bruce starts to improvise and respond to the crowd’s pleas.  He calls an audible to the band and they pick it up immediately. It is a huge ask for any band to follow but these guys have been together so many years they are fearless, share an almost telepathic understanding, and will go wherever the Boss takes them.  The real insight is to the relationship between Springsteen and his drummer Max Weinberg – it is Max who must know where the set is going and what comes next, his beat that leads the others, and he doesn’t take his eyes off Bruce, ever.  Honourable mention too for someone else who has to watch every twitch - Springsteen’s personal guitar technician. Not only does he need to be there to hand over the right guitar at the right moment, but he must do so on the fly.  Despite the thrill of watching it, it is a heart stopping moment when Bruce hurls his beloved ‘52 Fender-Esquire in a high vertical arc to be caught in the safe hands of Kevin Buell.

There have been several other live recordings from Bruce and E-Street over the years, and this is a band that above all needs to be seen live to be fully appreciated, but this release is special.  Perhaps because I was there in Hyde Park and it feels personal, but mostly because this arguably reveals the band at their best – hugely confident, delighting in the fun of the show and celebrating the Glory Days.  At an advance showing of the DVD at the Curzon in Soho in 16 June the spirit was infectious; the only film I’ve been too where people were dancing in the aisles. Bruce has said many times that they take their fun very seriously; it is their job to be the best they can, to throw a big party and give fans a great time.  There is a solid work ethic here, and a deal with the audience.  Fans have been speculating for some time about how much longer Bruce and the band can keep on delivering; they may be ageing but they are also playing better and stronger than ever.  Bruce has described the miraculous transformation which occurs when they step on stage and all become 16 years old again; this DVD captures something of that magic.  I hope and believe this is not the final tour, but if it is, it is a magnificent swansong.

Springsteen's Promise

The film of the making of Darkness on the Edge of Town (The Promise) has been given the premiere treatment in Canada, the USA, London and Rome.  It is compelling viewing, by turns funny, moving and painful.  There is something of the home movie quality to it (which is essentially what it was) and it offers a glimpse of something extraordinarily revealing and intimate.  From the outset there is the stark reminder of the years having slipped away so fast in the footage of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, all looking so young (and so skinny). This is accentuated throughout by inter-cutting the old footage with contemporary film of the band members (spookily including many scenes with the steady blue-eyed gaze of the late, great and much missed band member Danny Federici).   It is amazing that such a visual document of this time exists at all, but that it has been left pretty much untouched for over 30 years is astonishing.  So too is the insight it provides into the craft of Springsteen’s song writing – the endless notebooks with their repeated reworking of songs until they are honed to perfection.  His description of taking bits from here and there and putting them together as if he were fixing up an old car with spare parts from the breaker’s yard, does not do justice to the complexity and intelligence of his mission.

There are some wonderful joyful moments of the band clearly having a lot of fun together, but there is also the exhaustion of endless repetition, trying to capture a sound and feel that was stubbornly elusive, something that Springsteen had an image of in his head but couldn’t fully articulate either to himself or to anyone else. As he acknowledged following the screening at the British Film Institute in London, “of course, I couldn’t explain that at the time to the other guys so they just thought I was driving them crazy.” In some ways the band made light of the toll this took – running a book on what weird demands or bizarre behaviour would emerge each day, but beneath that it is remarkable they stayed together and stuck it out.  This was a painful and exhausting process which consumed every moment of their lives.  These days (whether the result of therapy or just maturity) Springsteen has developed the self-awareness and emotional intelligence to recognise the demons that drove him, and to understand their importance in his work.

Not only did the selection of songs for Darkness have to be just right regardless of what ended up being dropped, but the way it sounded needed to offer a coherent narrative.  In the documentary Springsteen describes something of what he was trying to achieve – the album wasn’t just about music, but about songs that had individual and collective integrity.  There are multiple influences that can be unravelled – both literary and from film noir, as well as the powerful autobiographical strands from growing up in a working class catholic immigrant community; there is a cinematic quality to the entire album that set out to tell a story. That story is about becoming an adult, taking responsibility, following a demanding work ethic, dealing with morality, guilt and redemption, and - above all - being true. The tone couldn’t be more different from its predecessor Born to Run and for a time that was part of the problem. As Bruce explained – many of the tracks they were struggling to locate grew out of that album’s ‘wall of sound’ method and had too much melody, too much richness of arrangement that just didn’t suit the mood and values of this dark place.  Darkness belongs resolutely to its time and yet is timeless; the story it tells is the one that “just doesn’t let you go” that Springsteen needed to tell, and keeps on telling.  Put together during the austere times and badlands of a 1970s recession, the themes and bleakness have an obvious resonance with present times. Darkness had to be the album that it was, but the 70 or so songs that could have made the cut were not a miscellaneous ragbag of outtakes or inferior material, they were left out for good reasons.  They may never have seen the light of day, although some surfaced over the years in live performance, but the fact that they have survived and will finally be issued as a collection is something to celebrate.  Not only does The Promise offer fans these precious lost sessions, but it provides a unique retrospective and access to an astonishing creative power.  Springsteen is notorious for holding onto the archive of his work in all its detail; the triumph of The Promise is that he did so.

The Promise: the darkness on the edge of town story, 3CD and 3 DVD set is released by Columbia on November 16.