Bruce Springsteen ~ Born In The U.S.A. (album review) ... God bless America, or not?

Style: Americana, folk-rock
Label: Columbia
Year: 1984
Home: New Jersey

Members: Bruce Springsteen ~ lead vocals/guitars
Roy Bittan ~ keyboards
Clarence Clemons ~ saxophone/percussion
Danny Federici ~ keyboards/glockenspiel
Garry Tallent ~ bass
Steven Van Zandt ~ acoustic guitar/mandolin/b. vocals
Max Weinberg ~ drums

Additional: Richie Rosenberg, Ruth Davis ~ b. vocals

I was just talking with someone the other day about which classic rocker was aging the best & maybe even looking a bit younger & better in some backwards logic way. No, Madonna is not the one who tops my list even if she has reinvented what it means to be a middle-aged woman. The Boss from Jersey is actually my top choice ... David Lee Roth is up there too, if you're wondering. Certainly the lack of drugs has helped, but he's grown into himself in a way that puts his once rough younger self to immature shame. He's no longer the angry bar hound but a storyteller along the lines of Bob Dylan. He always was but today we expect from him a personal story over a flashy stage show. It also helps that his music has aged as well as he has & his new music just as good as ever, maybe at times better. Though, really, in hindsight, there's something funny & very un-aging well about a song about being born in the great U.S.A. that features tinkling Wham!-esque keyboards & no guitar solo. It seems very un-American, particularly for hard rocking 1984. Musically this is not the album I remember or even want to remember. It's too pop & certainly BS remarked at the time how pop he had gone. I remember something that rocked harder & not so dated & certainly not with such a keyboard heavy sound or at least a production that favored the Foreigner feel. But, really, this is a storyteller's album & that's how it should be graded as the music is really just a background to something bigger. So often the lyrics are a background to the music. That being said, the talk in the title track about a Viet Vet certainly reminds me of my youth when such things mattered, but now they are just passing lines of nostalgia as relevant as talking about the Southern Reconstruction or the Spanish Civil War or maybe even Desert Storm. How different would the title track be if written today? It certainly wouldn't be about a Viet Vet. I might be more angry sounding, though I don't know if it would sound as enjoyable & almost unpretentious. Perhaps, the whole album would be far more angry if made in today's America. Definitely, it would probably have far more guitar solos than sax solos & far less keyboards, which lace too much of the album for its own good. It's in the strength of the lyrics that we forget the weakness of the sound. It's an album of characters, who happen to live in the U.S.A., & those characters are very much living & breathing as much as any lyricist could want. In many ways, we may even make this album greater than it is ... considering the previous albums might be more interestingly musically & what came afterwards was a bit of a disappointment in comparison ... the magic is that these characters are much more humble in some ways than those characters that had come before. Before they were definitely angry young men, but here they've matured, still angry but can handle themselves better through the ups & downs. His kids before might have been disillusioned, but now they can deal with it in a way that doesn't cause the trouble they'd skirted with at the edge of town. Though, the pop sensibility of this album, this was BS's first work with synthesizers, masks a bit of the agony they still feel. Ironically, most of the album would be recorded before the very different & rawer sounding Nebraska. Given that Nebraska ended up being a release of demos, this new pop yet mature BS is almost an accident that it came to come together so cohesively versus a track here or there as it had been originally written. That might be what really makes it special, the fact that its an accident & not a grand scheme to create some great album of the era, even if the joke was on the conservatives in the end.

Bruce Springsteen ~ VH1 Storytellers (DVD review) ... The boss explains the devil & dust!

Style: rock, Americana
Label: Columbia
Year: 2005
Home: New Jersey

Concert location: Two River Theater, NJ, VH1 Storytellers
Year Recorded: April 2005
Length: 115 minutes

Bonus Features: 15 minute audience Q&A

Members: Bruce Springsteen ~ guitar/vocals/piano

Guest: Patti Scialfa ~ b. vocals

This is the complete concert, including an unaired question & answer session, filmed for VH1's Storytellers tv series where artists explain the songs during the performance. BS takes the approach of doing a stripped down unplugged performance with just his voice, his acoustic guitar, a piano for one track & his wife slipping in for backing vocals on "Nebraska". Considering the show follows the release of BS's third folk release Devils & Dust, it's no surprise that he's chosen an acoustic format, while at the same time looking back to where he came from & the music he's honed it's also a no risk moment, as it might be for other musicians. His songs work well stripped down to their absolute basics & BS's voice is as good as ever. It's a very comfortable set-up that doesn't feel gimmicky or odd, let alone it brings the inherent intimacy of the show & in turn the lyrics right up front. It also helps that BS stays away from some of his bigger hits, that are dependent on an electric guitar thump, for more storytelling songs. He also deliberately choses songs that show different lyrical approaches over the years. The result is anything but a disappointment. For those that know the "Born In The U.S.A." bar band BS this concert will show the side of BS that has kept so many fans coming back even when he wasn't topping the charts. It shows the BS so many of don't remember because of the bigger pop songs on MTV. Actually, he often feels a little bit like Tom Waits without the oddness, particularly when he sits at the piano for "Jesus Was An Only Son" & "Thunder Road". It's a guy who writes songs because it seems like the easiest thing on earth to do. Besides the fact that he might be one of the best aging rock stars, he still performs with the same swagger he had when he was just starting his career. As for the behind the lyrics part of the show he goes line by line through each song. As he says of "Devils & Dust", after performing the song fully: "What's working against the lyrics? The music, that's the sound of resistance. It's the unspoken subtext that the lyrics rest on." BS takes the concept of the show to heart. But, then, he confesses: "How much of this was I thinking about when I wrote the song? None of it. I wrote all of that yesterday afternoon on my kitchen table." Thus, he says more about the show than anyone could, moving right on to "Blinded By The Light", made famous by Manfred Mann, which was a deliberate ploy for a pop hit for producer Clive Davis "with a rhyming dictionary in one hand & a notebook in the other." The rest of the descriptions include lots of humor & float between spontaneous stories & pre-conceived lyrical notes in a notebook that stays by his side. At one point he even sings one of the songs imitating Smokey Robinson. It's a must see moment. Even with notepad in hand & the self-confession of having done some homework, never once does BS feel anything but honest. He's certainly not arrogant or claiming to be anything but a humble songwriter. & he certainly is never less than entertaining. Any fan who hasn't seen this is missing the elder statesman at his best. Any fan that only knows the "Born In The USA" BS doesn't know BS. The fascinating thing about VH1 Storytellers, particularly with BS's chosen stripped down & line by line approach, is the pacing is different. There's no flash or polish. The most low-key performance possible. It meanders & he fumbles. He forgets his harmonica a couple times. You hang on every moment. It might be one of the best VH1 Storytellers made, even though its a long way into the series as episode 62. The fact that he did some prep work might make it less spontaneous to some, but it also makes the show everything it can be. Welcome to my studio ... welcome to my pen & paper. Welcome to the end of the Jersey pier on a late night with a bottle of beer. It's also all about the lyrics. Welcome to English 101. It might only be eight songs but few will probably complain. The bonus feature is a fifteen minute Q&A with the audience that opens with an audience member saying he feels like he knows BS, does he? The response: "No. It's part of the job, that whole feeling like I know you." It might be part of the job but the rest of the talk is unpretentious, un-showy & what is VH1 Storytellers is all about, the person under the persona.