From: owner-luckytown-digest@luckytown.org (LuckyTown Digest) To: luckytown-digest@luckytown.org Subject: LuckyTown Digest V9 #47 Reply-To: luckytown@luckytown.org Sender: owner-luckytown-digest@luckytown.org Errors-To: owner-luckytown-digest@luckytown.org Precedence: bulk LuckyTown Digest Monday, July 29 2002 Volume 09 : Number 047 NOTE: Sale/trade posts should be emailed to luckytown-ads, *NOT* to luckytown. That includes tix wanted/tix grovels, post them to luckytown-ads, please. Contents: GA, Cincinatti, and safety [John Hocking ] 7/26 rehearsal show notes ["Kevin Kinder" ] `Rising' To The Task: Springsteen confronts the wounds of Sept. 11 on new CD. (Larry Katz, The Boston Herald) [Bar] Review: 'Bruce Dances In The Dark' (David Means, The New York Observer) [Barry Kaplovitz Subject: GA, Cincinatti, and safety Greetings from Athens, Georgia I'm a social scientist and, although not an expert in an academic sense, one of the topics about which I've taught and published is crowd behavior. About one month before eleven people were trampled, suffocated, and killed in Cincinnati, I stood in line for a Who show in Atlanta under what had to be nearly identical circumstances. (1979?) I remember the experience well. I can understand easily how Cincinnati happened. I also remember Cincinnati well as a venue because in early July of 1984 I drove there alone, a 1,000 mile round trip, to see Bruce play Friday and Saturday shows on the second stop of the BitUSA tour. Here's what happened in Atlanta. It was "festival seating," which meant anyone could sit anywhere. My friends and I had been in line most of the day outside one the the few doors which would be open; they opened the doors about 6pm for the 7:30 or 8pm show. There was an immediate breakdown of what British Social Psychologists who study soccer hooliganism call the "cue principle." Everyone rushed for the one open door, and there had to be only a half dozen or so single open doors around the entire arena. Madness. I'm 6'2" and weigh about 180 and I was crushed as we inched closer and closer to the door. My poor 5'5" 110 wife was lifted off her feet by the surging crown and nearly passed out by the time we got to the door. I had my arms around her trying to give to just a few fractions of an inch more space but it was hopeless. It became scarier and scarier and I did fear for our safety and if I could have turned and gotten out of there we would have, but the crush was enormous and reversing course was not an option. When we finally got to the ONE open door there were a couple of security people checking the tickets one by one and slowly letting people in, one at a time. Idiots. I tried to tell them they need to open at least a second door and get more people in more quickly, but was ignored. I went to a manager and he said they were aware of the problem. (Apparently not going to do anything about it, but we're aware.) In hindsight I should have pursued it more aggressively, written letters, whatever, and perhaps could have had some positive effect on Cincinnati. I did nothing and I am sorry. I remember reading that security refused to open more doors well after they knew they had injury/death potential in Cincinnati. (Side: note: The first thing I did after getting a hotel room in Cincinnati was to go to the arena to look for a ticket AND the memorial to The Eleven and there was NOTHING. To me this is akin to the novel, "1984" when they would change history by simply changing the history books. You can't make one of the most significant tragedies in American Rock and Roll History go away by just omitting it from history. (Yes, it pales in comparison to some International soccer disasters.) Didn't they also build a gym where the perhaps the worst event, except 9/11, in my lifetime happened: Kent State, May 4, 1970, a day that ranks in infamy for me with Pearl Harbor, John Kennedy, and the Challenger. Is there a Memorial for the victims at Kent State?) Well the GA tickets for Bruce are only on the floor, so they should be dealing with relatively few people compared to the full 17,000 getting in to see the Who. But crowds can be dangerous and the source of the danger is partially the result of the degree of physiological arousal that produces excitement (or panic in other situations) that comes with live rock. If there are problems I'd predict they are going to be most correlated with ticket demand. Since there's only one show everywhere, I believe the danger will be in those huge markets such as NJ/NY, Boston, Washington, Chicago, LA, San Jose, and so on. The most fanatical of Tramps will covet those up-front SRO spaces, but I believe the danger will be in the que (line) to claim them. The Who situation was not unlike the panic of exiting a burning theater with too few exits. There is electricity in the air when I wake up the morning of a Bruce show, and it builds all day long. Walking towards the arena, interacting with tailgaters, the air crackles with energy. Even middle aged people, i.e., like me, around Bruce's age, will do things that they wouldn't do under any other circumstances. If alone, I'd rush a door if I thought I could stand in front of the stage to see Bruce. So I write this as a warning to Bruce's people and for all of us who will see a show. There is danger in GA seating that does not exist in reserved seating. Please do not understimate or dismiss this. Think it through. Have some contingency plans. E.G., put some people with walkie talkies or cell pones in the middle of the crowds in line to alert officials if immediate changes need to be made. So what if someone without a GA ticket gets on the floor if it prevents an injury. The Who tragedy was avoidable and must never happen again. Obviously any time something like that happens it is awful, but it would be absolutely horrific if it happened at a Bruce Springsteen show. Please error on the side of caution. And those of you in Cincinnati, how about a plaque or something. It happened. Kent State happened. John Kennedy happened. The Challenger happened. We can't pretend these things away. Let's learn from them. The Memorial can be a positive thing in that it can be symbolic of a turning point in which something like that will never be allowed to happen again. Thanks for reading. After my 1979 experience when I did nothing, I had to write. John John E. Hocking, Ph.D. University of Georgia Athens, GA 30602 "Hey I know its late, we can make it if we run." Bruce Springsteen "Thunder Road" Song one, "Born to Run" (1975) ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 23:49:28 -0500 From: "Kevin Kinder" Subject: 7/26 rehearsal show notes My notes from the 7/26 rehearsal show at Convention Hall in Asbury Park: I posted the setlist yesterday. It should come as a shock to no one that Bruce as usual believes strongly in his new material, and the setlists are likely to focus heavily on the new album. Half of the rehearsal setlist came from "The Rising". It's a powerful show, and I think that fans who like the new album will love the tour. I was impressed with how well the band sounds this early on. The show was scheduled for 2pm, but we all know Bruce never starts at the scheduled time. At 2:15pm Bruce surprised by coming out onstage alone to address the crowd, opening with "So you guys won a contest?". He asked some people where they were from, including asking how many people *weren't* from New York or New Jersey. He said they were going to have kind of a show, kind of a rehearsal, and that since the tour was still over a week away there was no rush (laughing). He said he and the band would be out later, and disappeared to applause. The rumor earlier in the week was that there were only ~800 radio contest winners for the Friday show. That estimate might have been high, because at about 2:15pm the Hall was less than 1/3 full of contest winners plus invited guests. At least some of the drop line outside must have gotten in shortly after the start of the show, because it filled in a bit, but I doubt the Hall ever got over 80% full. For most of the show the outside doors were open, and reportedly people on the beach got a good listen. Bruce dedicated BTR to the people listening outside. The E Street Band is now ten, with Soozie Tyrell on violin and vocals. Them's a lot of people on that stage. Bruce on 'Lonesome Day': "Damn, it's a good one!" 'The Fuse' came off much better live than I expected, great guitar work by Nils and Bruce. 'Empty Sky' was started with Bruce and Patti facing each at the center mic, and was introduced by Bruce as "We worked this out this morning at the breakfast table". With a subdued arrangement that worked really well, Patti provided backing vocals, Bruce played acoustic guitar and harmonica, Steve played Mandolin, and Clarence played tambourine. 'You're Missing' was a complex arrangement, starting subdued and building through the song. Soozie's violin shone here. 'Waitin' on a Sunny Day' was dedicated to Asbury Park, and preceded by a pitch by Bruce for the crowd to check out the Asbury Park retailers after the show. Bruce tried to get the crowd to sing the Brady-Bunch-ish chorus (eventually they learned it) and Clarence did a nice sax solo. 'Worlds Apart' included Danny on accordion, with Bruce taking the guitar solos. This was the highlight of the show, IMHO. They flowed straight from Worlds Apart into Two Hearts. 'Mary's Place' started with Bruce using the wrong lyrics and cracking up about it, I think he might have lapsed into "All That Heaven Will Allow". He halted the band and they restarted. 'Mary's Place' was used to introduce the band, and the introductions were kept much shorter than last tour. Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out was done without the bloat of the band intros and was much better for it. 'Counting on a Miracle' was clearly intended as a crowd pleaser, I liked it a lot, but it somehow went flat with the crowd. 'Into the Fire' was the set-closer, and included Clarence on bagpipes. Before 'My City of Ruins', Bruce made another pitch for the merchants of his "adopted city," mentioning live music at El Negro (sp?), the Saint, and the Stone Pony. The shock of the day was the live band version of BitUSA. After recovering from being stunned, I believe it was done with the choruses unsung except at the start & end, assumably so the uninformed would listen to the rest of the song. The crowd ate it up. No 'Light of Day'. Yaaaaayyy! The entire show was filmed. My guess is that in addition to a self-check, they wanted film clips for Nightline/UpClose, and a live video for The Rising. If Bruce watches the video, I'd guess he might vow to write off radio-ticket-winner crowds. I'm sure it was a factor that many in the crowd were hearing the new songs for the first time, and the Hall not being full didn't help, but the electricity of the audiences at the 1999 rehearsal shows was much much higher. On Friday Bruce had to work the crowd pretty hard early on to get the folks in the bleacher seats to stand. I think the main reason for the second take of "The Rising" was because by the end the crowd was much more into it, and the video crew got much better crowd reaction shots from behind the band. The stage layout looked like the standard Bruce end stage, including the raised rear with a ramp to allow him to visit the folks out back (which I'd guess will happen on a couple of the singalongs, but at the Convention Hall there were no seats back there). The band arrangement on stage looked like last tour, with the addition of Soozie between Roy and Max: Danny-Max-Soozie-Roy across the back row, Clarence-Nils-Bruce-Steve-Patti across the front, Garry moving around in front of Max. Re: GA: I was disappointed that they aren't being more creative with the stage layout to provide a bigger footprint for GA, ala U2. With the end stage layout, at CH they had the floor split in two segments separated by a fenced DMZ, so they could limit the number of people in the floor section closest the stage. I didn't see any pushing/surging except at the very end when Bruce leaned out to high-five people (same surge happened last tour). In sum: I give it a big thumbs-up. - ----- Kevin Kinder kinder@luckytown.org ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 12:26:51 -0500 From: Barry Kaplovitz Subject: `Rising' To The Task: Springsteen confronts the wounds of Sept. 11 on new CD. (Larry Katz, The Boston Herald) The Boston Herald July 26, 2002 `Rising' To The Task: Springsteen confronts the wounds of Sept. 11 on new CD By Larry Katz Friday, July 26, 2002 Bruce Springsteen knows what his job is. In the days after the Sept. 11 attack, Springsteen and every other American grappled with the same question: How do we go on from here? ``The Rising,'' in stores Tuesday, is his answer. After spending his career examining the lives, dreams and disappointments of his fellow citizens, he has stepped up to confront the most daunting task facing a songwriter today. He has delivered a song cycle that flows from the aching wounds opened last September. Springsteen's approach is subtle enough. Listen without a lyric sheet in front of you and ``The Rising'' betrays little obvious Sept. 11 connection. You won't find a single overt mention of terrorists, crashing planes or twin towers. If the mood of the album is sometimes somber, it's downright frolicsome compared to Springsteen's last studio album, 1995's bleak ``The Ghost of Tom Joad.'' Put its half-dozen liveliest cuts together and you have just what many longtime fans will come to ``The Rising'' looking for: an anthemic rock reunion of Springsteen and the E Street Band on their first new studio album in 15 years. When the E Street Band starts cranking, ``The Rising'' exudes classic rock flavor. Max Weinberg holds the course with his march band drumming, Clarence Clemons adds occasional brawny old school saxophone and the other E Streeters play their accustomed roles. On the instant favorite ``Mary's Place,'' a song that recalls both Springsteen's epic ``Rosalita'' and Van Morrison's ``Caravan,'' Springsteen seems to consciously look to the musical past by describing a dance party fueled by out-of-date LPs, not CDs. But such exuberant tracks come surrounded by more austere, downbeat numbers that quickly squelch any party momentum. The sequencing, which juxtaposes joy and sadness, is jarring. Intentionally so, it appears. Springsteen, the most deliberate of rock auteurs, has fashioned an emotional roller coaster that mirrors the swings from despair to hopefulness experienced by those who have experienced a great loss. Four of the 15 songs on ``The Rising'' were written before Sept. 11, but in this context even these seem connected to the aftermath of that day's events. Crisply produced by Brendan O'Brien (Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots), a newcomer to the Springsteen camp, ``The Rising'' begins with ``Lonesome Day,'' a punchy rocker streaked with foreboding. Springsteen describes an ominous situation (``Hell's brewin,' dark sun's on the rise''), but stays steadfast with an optimism he will soon need (``Let kingdom come I'm gonna find my way through this lonesome day''). On ``Into the Fire,'' he takes what might be the point of view of the spouse of a missing World Trade Center firefighter. Sounding his main theme, he acknowledges the value of doing what must be done, no matter what the cost (``I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher''). The song's prayerlike chorus leads to the incongruously cheery ``Waitin' On A Sunny Day,'' which makes sense only as a declaration of unquenchable faith in a better future. ``Nothing Man'' was written pre-9/11, but you'd never guess it wasn't intended as a psychological portrait of a guilt-ridden hero struggling with thoughts of suicide. Springsteen has no balm to offer, but counters with the bouncy number, ``Countin' On A Miracle,'' which embraces the idea that the best way to honor a lost loved one is to live a good life. But even the most positive thinkers can feel angry, scared and staggered by the loss of a loved one. The political becomes personal when a victim's spouse finds the piece of ``Empty Sky'' left by the fallen World Trade Center echoed by ``an empty impression in the bed where you used to be.'' With ``Worlds Apart,'' Springsteen reaches out to the musical world of Pakistani singers Asif Ali Khan and Group to evoke an apparent romance between an American soldier and an Afghan woman. As if to offer reassurance through the familiar after this unusual move into world beat waters, ``Let's Be Friends (Skin to Skin)'' is a warm r & b song exploring similar love-the-one-you're-with territory. But even this happy tune comes with a warning: ``Good times got a way of comin' to an end.'' The snarling rocker ``Further On Up the Road'' is another pre-9/11 song, but its references to guns, bullets, the desert and dust stir up apocalyptic visions. ``The Fuse'' starts with a funeral and ends with a steamy afternoon liaison that finds an affirmation of life in sex. ``Mary's Place'' is a call to party, but just like the other upbeat tracks on ``The Rising,'' it's a musical Trojan horse and not quite what it seems on the outside. The party at ``Mary's Place'' is a brave attempt to get back to the business of living, knowing full well that the person you most want to be with is only alive ``in my locket, I keep it close to my heart.'' The devastating loss of a loved one is poignantly limned in the details of ``You're Missing'' (``Pictures on the nightstand, TV's on in the den, your house is waiting for you to walk in''). And then the title cut puts us smack in the smoking, smoldering, soon-to-crumble World Trade Center with a heroic rescuer. Death is certain, but the song's gospel fervor summons a ``sky of fullness, sky of blessed life.'' I doubt that I would have figured out that the first verse of ``Paradise'' is about a female Palestinian suicide bomber and the second about a widow whose husband died in the Pentagon on Sept. 11 if I hadn't read a recent interview with Springsteen. But the least obscure part of this song --the only song performed by a multitracked Springsteen without the E Street Band-- is its conclusion, in which a suicide attempt results in a renewed appreciation of life. ``The Rising'' closes with ``My City of Ruins,'' a song written about urban renewal in Springsteen's home state of New Jersey that became a Sept. 11 elegy when he performed it on a TV benefit for victims of the attack. Springsteen feels despair at the destruction he sees. But give up? Never. ``How do I begin again?'' he asks, before providing the answer: ``With these hands.'' With his songwriting hands, Springsteen has provided a serious, moving, populist work of art that deals with the emotional fallout of Sept. 11. But ``The Rising'' is more than a collection of songs tied specifically to that day. It's an affirmation of the everyday heroism of people who carry on doing their jobs the best they can despite difficulties great and small. Now, with ``The Rising'' arriving in stores, Springsteen has another job to do. His 39-city tour opens in New Jersey on Aug. 7 and comes to the FleetCenter in Boston on Oct. 4. There's no risk at all in predicting it will be inspirational. http://www2.bostonherald.com/entertainment/music/katz07262002.htm Copyright by the Boston Herald and Herald Interactive Advertising Systems, Inc. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 22:29:31 -0500 From: Barry Kaplovitz Subject: Review: 'Bruce Dances In The Dark' (David Means, The New York Observer) From The New York Observer Issue date: July 29, 2002 Bruce Dances In The Dark By David Means As a fiction writer, I'm always looking for what Faulkner called "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself." But recently, the world poured on too much material. I'm not sure what to do with 9/11. Two boys down the street play whiffleball in their front yard without a father. He got up and went to work and didn't come back. I can hear the tap of the bat on the ball from my study window. On the other hand, watching the Dow bubble burst has been good fodder. I read The Wall Street Journal, savoring stories like that of William Flynn, a barber in Dennis, Mass., who has seen his portfolio dwindle from $800,000 to almost nothing. Now he has to give cuts to make ends meet: razor cuts and flips and buzz-cuts and all the rest. It's not that I like his suffering, it's just that for a fiction writer, interested in stories, it's good stuff. It's the stuff of a Bruce Springsteen song. Back in the day, Bruce Springsteen was a larynx channeler, drawing forth the twangy voice of the Dust Bowl, of Woody Guthrie (who in turn was doing his own channeling). His best songs were self-contained narratives of what the short-story master Frank O'Connor liked to call the submerged population$people on the edge, people with secrets to keep. The action was limited, but specific. People ran away from home. Cars crashed. Crosses were carried. Redemption was sought. The best songs resolved themselves$in the manner of short stories$by leaving us with a small sliver of the overall picture and a narrative nudge forward. If Turgenev came out from under Gogol's "Overcoat," then Bruce came out from under Woody Guthrie's denim shirt. Mr. Springsteen was a working-class Catholic East Coast kid who eventually reached outward to the rural to find his subject matter. Bob Dylan was pretty much a guy from the hinterlands who came to Green Witch Village, as we call it out there, to find his scene. Bruce shape-shifted slowly$over the course of four records$until he found himself embodying the isolated regions of the working class. By the time The River came out, he was poised in dusty old country farmhouse interiors, singing of Ramrods, of redemptive trips down to the River, of Jackson Cage, of Cadillac Ranch. The bombast of his early work had fallen away and left us with something like unpolished silver, a voice that was darkly tarnished yet, with a few swipes of melody, revealed a shimmering purity beneath. When he recorded his masterpiece, Nebraska, in his home studio, the Boss had a voice that zeroed in on something deeply, brilliantly, perfectly authentic. His hoots and hollers, his laments about two brothers$one good, one bad$his mansions on the hill and his highway patrolmen were solidly, radically true. They went fully against the Reagan myth-making machine. Above all, Nebraska was a blatant attempt at documentation. In a landscape scraped clear by postmodernism, the sound of authenticity is what matters. The credentials of the source seemed secondary to the vision. Now Nebraska is a cult record, passed on by word of mouth among younger fans, cited on lists of influences in Rolling Stone, and the subject of tributes. Bruce's mode of redocumentation has now been embraced by the people who flocked to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, by those who accept Gillian Welch, and by most people who celebrate Lucinda Williams. In some ways, you can hear overtones of Nebraska all over the place: in Wilco's brilliant Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and even in the White Stripes' masterful White Blood Cells. Then Bruce took the tight, echoey silence of the Nebraska recording, the incognito vibrancy of that singular howling voice, and reunited with the E Street Band to produce Born in the U.S.A.: a beautiful rendition of the American Spirit, the force of the working class, the pounding lament to Vietnam, and the paradox of hanging tight to those lame promises made, to a belief in the great American Sisyphean dream machine. A few days after 9/11, I put the old cassette of Born in the U.S.A., twisted and worn, on the car deck as I drove past West Point, across the Bear Mountain Bridge, along the Hudson River. It was the perfect moment to hear it. I remembered walking the East Village streets, literally just off the bus from Michigan, a Midwestern bumpkin (there's no other word) working a summer internship at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, listening to Born in the U.S.A. in my Walkman headphones, keenly aware of the wildly divergent nature of Bruce's vision$the elegiac, mythic nature of his vocal intonations combining with the pre-gentrified grit of the East Village crossing my field of vision. I was a kid who was born and raised on Johnny Cash. My father played At Folsom Prison constantly. Cash was the only thing I remember coming from our big, warm stereo console. Even then I knew Cash was uncool. I knew he was an unhip Republican. But I like to believe that I knew that one day Cash would become cool. In Michigan, my next-door neighbor was a lank old coot, an electrician at the paper mill down the hill; he came home drunk deep in the heart of the night and sang laments to himself. I'd wake up, press my face against the screen, gaze down at him on his porch to see his shadowy arm lifting the bottle. So it seemed natural$walking the New York streets for the first time$to hear Bruce belting out the stories I knew to be true. Anyway, I cared little for the concept of cool I saw around me in the East Village during the 80's. It seemed shallow and cold. My idea of cool$unfashionable as it was at that time$was to know how to properly hop a freight without having your foot amputated. When the news was announced a few weeks ago that Bruce had reunited with the E Street Band to record their first studio album in 17 years, a post?9/11 CD called The Rising, my hope was that he would follow Tom Waits and Dylan into middle age, reinventing his old sound and, in the process, producing his best work. My hope was that Bruce and the E Street Band would rock with tight narrative spirals, inturning and eternal, like the gyre in the Yeats poem, self-sustaining, outside the reductive noise of pop culture. A few days ago, before I heard the entire CD, I went over to Borders in White Plains, bought the single "The Rising," and listened to it driving back over the Tappan Zee Bridge. What I heard made my heart sink. Bruce sang but didn't seem to inhabit his words, and he even seemed slightly hesitant, as if he hadn't fully internalized the possible phrasings. The song seemed overproduced. As a power anthem, it felt muddled and cluttered. In the old days, Max Weinberg's drums usually served as a kind of maypole of beats, steady and hard, around which Bruce wrapped his voice. Here there was little distance between my ears and the music. "The Rising" was inspirational in a vague way, ethereal and wide. The allusion is to something called the Rising; the command is that we should all come up to it. I listened to "The Rising" several times, downloaded it into my iBook, and fed it into my head via my headphones. Eventually, I began to like the song. I didn't love it, but I understood where it was coming from and what it was trying to do and the fact that it was written to inspire and that it came from the Boss' heart. It was a new sound, but it was still Bruce singing, and I could deal with his calling upon me to lift myself up above the darkness. Whatever the Rising was, I wanted to be in on it. The day the CD appeared at my door, I was on my way to visit my good friend Rabbi Jeff Hoffman. I put off listening to the record and went over to Jeff's house. He explained to me that it happened to be Tishah, the saddest day of the Jewish year. He showed me an essay he had just contributed to a collection of kinot, poems expressing mourning, pain and sorrow. They are poetic responses to events such as the destruction of the First and Second Temples. The titles of the kinot speak for themselves and even sound like good song titles: "Seek, You Who Have Been Consumed by Fire," "Oh That My Head Were Water," "On This Night My Children Cry." And in some ways, we agreed, The Rising is a collection of kinot, a series of poetic laments alluding$most of the time$to the events of 9/11. There is no simple way to suffer, no easy way into the terror and loss that happened on a single day at the tip of Manhattan. So like all of us, Bruce had to struggle his way into the metaphors, search for the possible expressions, the right images that might$or might not$convey a sense of loss, and a way into redemption. Out of this search comes an unevenness that is reasonable and even in some ways hopeful. On the best songs there is a sense of inhabiting the pain, clear images and metaphors married neatly with the music, which at times moves experimentally forward. On the weaker songs you sense an urgency, a desire to become bardic, to speak to the audience in a hopeful manner. It feels painfully obvious that many of the songs were recorded in haste. They are devoid of precise images, and produced in a way that rearranges the old, classic E Street sound. Gone is the echoey space of Nebraska, the raucous roar of Born in the U.S.A., and the austerity of The River; long gone is the elegiac overlaying of Born to Run. It's hard to say what exact element is missing, but it seems to have something to do with composition, with the unity that once came from arranging several songs into a neat 45-minute vinyl disk, each song intricately talking to the other to create a perfect whole. After several listens, I came up with this conclusion: The mix, produced by a new guy, Brendan O'Brien, is off$the sound has an awkward spatial sense, too immediate, too bright and too digital. In many songs, the subject matter is at odds with this brightness. When it works, it works, such as in the song "Nothing Man," a narrative about a dead fireman (I think), with fine lyrics and a sense of Bruce really getting into the skin of the story, singing, "Around here, everybody acts like nothing's changed / Friday night, the club meets at Al's Barbecue / The sky's still the same unbelievable blue." "Counting on a Miracle" sounds close to the old E Street sound, with a few electronic flourishes and nice string arrangements (there are lots of strings appearing on this CD). Something Southern seeped in that reminded me of Steve Earle. The song that struck me the most and that has stayed with me is called "Empty Sky." It's a deeply personal lament in which the sadness of the lyrics merges perfectly with the mechanical movement of the forward beat: "I want a kiss from your lips / I want an eye for an eye / I woke up this morning to an empty sky." A few nights ago, I put "Empty Sky" on as I drove down 9W. My kids were in the back seat$we were going to an old ice-cream stand up near Stony Point$and coming out on the Honda's feeble stereo speakers, the tune sounded perfect. As a matter of fact, most of The Rising benefits from being played over the Honda speakers, which tones down the shrill quality and gives it a dusky a.m. yellowish hue, moving Bruce's vocals to the back a little bit. In "Worlds Apart," Bruce stretches, reaching for a new sound, and ends up with a strange yet highly familiar amalgamation of "Dead Man Walking" vocals mixed with world music. It's Sting territory. It feels too safe to be genuinely new. But once Springsteen starts really singing, it rocks more than anything Sting has done since he left the Police. But this song, more than any other on the record, seems representative of the overall problem: Bruce is still Bruce, still singing as well as ever, but the music itself doesn't serve his vision. This is the case, in particular, with the songs that are meant to be rockers in the tradition of "Hungry Heart." One such song, "Let's Be Friends (Skin to Skin)," feels lacking in lyrical focus. Even fun songs need narrative details. "Hungry Heart" has one story line: "Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack / I went out for a ride and I never went back." That " . Baltimore, Jack" is just enough to root the song in narrative. Once you have that, you can rock along to the rest without worry. You believe in the song. You go along with the story. Most of the weaker songs on The Rising lack that specific pinpoint moment. Then there are two power anthems that wake things up: the aforementioned "The Rising," and the opening song, "Lonesome Day," which is bright and strong but also has an overmixed feeling, a sensation of being both too clear and too muddled at the same time. But ultimately, the failure seems rooted in the writing and the structure of the songs; there just isn't enough lyrical complexity to keep things going over the long haul. The repetitive use of the phrase "Lonesome Day" lacks weight when it isn't backed up by any specific details. Again, I longed for stories. I wanted screen doors to slam; I wanted fights in the back streets. In a few places, the new technology melds just right with the song to provide forceful laments: A favorite is "The Fuse," a song that stretches Bruce into new territory musically, yet has the kind of writing that he does best: "Down at the court house they're ringing the flag down / Long black line of cars snaking / Slow through town." "Mary's Place" and "Further Down the Road" are both a return to form. The band kicks in like the old E Street; there is narrative at work. I hate to use the phrase, but these songs$aside from new sound production that isn't quite right$seem like the old Bruce. A lonely edge rides beneath the songs, a taint of the sadness that must inhabit all good stories. Here we go, I thought. The fact that it sounded a little too bright and too digital can be forgiven. When I was told friends I was reviewing The Rising, some shrugged and said they didn't like Bruce anymore, or never had. Others told me they loved his old stuff, the Born to Run era, and some warned me to be careful not to trash it, because the diehard fans would come after me. But I think it's the diehard fans$at least the younger ones$who are going to come down hardest on this new record. The older fans$like me$will be happy to have some new E Street material. We'll program our CD players, do our own editing, and find the perfect play list. But the young fans, who have embraced Nebraska and his early work, who listen to Ralph Stanley and Johnny Cash, are going to pick The Rising apart. They're used to new masterpieces by old fogies like Dylan and Waits. The Rising isn't Springsteen's masterpiece. It suffers slightly from CD bloat: 73 minutes is too much music. In the early years the Boss took his time, discarded the clunkers (all of which were released on the recent three-disk compilation, Tracks) and shaped the production so that it was exactly right. He trusted the sophistication of his fans and the fact that he was a populist singer, not a popular one. But if Bruce is anything, he's heartfelt and sincere and brave and upbeat. He believes in the human spirit. He's an optimist. In The Rising, we feel his sorrow over 9/11 and his desire to come out into the public again as our national bard; to represent us all at this time of need. But inherent in this task comes risk and stress. Our national bard of the working class has met his match in the empty-tooth gap of the Manhattan skyline, and in the dead firemen enshrouded in the American flag. Even the Boss is slightly at a loss for words. And who can blame him? Not me. The howls and yelps of Born in the U.S.A. seem more apropos to our time: music painfully rooted in our national geopolitical nightmare in Southeast Asia, placed alongside songs that tell stories of the homeland: "No Surrender," "Darlington County," "Glory Days" and "Dancing in the Dark." It's a mystery the way art surpasses history and time. Bob Dylan released Love and Theft on 9/11, and just about everything in it speaks directly to the events of that day. A few months later, Tom Waits releases Blood Money, a record with a thumping lament of a song$a healing masterpiece$called "Misery Is the River of the World." Of course, none of this matters. Most Springsteen fans are just glad to have a new record. I'll certainly be playing much of this CD as I drive to Michigan tomorrow, and already my daughter, age 10, is in love with the song "Empty Sky." She knows what it means and sings along with it and loves the phrase "I woke up this morning to an empty sky," because it's the right phrase at the right time. We did wake up to an empty sky that day, and we still wake up to an empty sky, and that's about all there is to say about it at this point. Ultimately, I consider The Rising to be the first in a series of comeback recordings, a stepping stone of sorts, a way into the future. Now that the E Street Band is reunited with the Boss, our great working-class storyteller is about to return completely to form. He'll give voice again to the stories of the submerged populace, who, by the time the next record comes out in a couple of years, will be nickel-and-diming their way through the post-Enron dust bowl. But for now, I'm still gonna be listening to The Rising, all summer, as I drive westward into the hinterlands. David Means' most recent collection of stories, Assorted Fire Events, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. You may reach David Means via email at: dmeans@observer.com. This column ran on page 1 in the 7/29/2002 edition of The New York Observer. COPYRIGHT 2002 THE NEW YORK OBSERVER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ------------------------------ End of LuckyTown Digest V9 #47 ****************************** ********************************************************************* ** LuckyTown WWW URL ** The LuckyTown FAQ, back issues, web-based subscription/unsubscription, and many other things can be found on the LuckyTown WWW Page: http://www.luckytown.org ** LuckyTown mailing list addresses ** You can send email to go into the next LuckyTown Digest to: luckytown@luckytown.org You can send email to go into the next LuckyTown-Ads Digest to: luckytown-ads@luckytown.org Any questions for the list admin should be emailed to: owner-luckytown@luckytown.org To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@luckytown.org with message body: unsubscribe luckytown-digest To get further information on how to subscribe/unsubscribe/change your subscription address, as well as the other available commands, send email to majordomo@luckytown.org with message body: help ********************************************************************* The contents of this digest are not necessarily approved by the list admin.