From: owner-luckytown-digest@luckytown.org (LuckyTown Digest) To: luckytown-digest@luckytown.org Subject: LuckyTown Digest V9 #68 Reply-To: luckytown@luckytown.org Sender: owner-luckytown-digest@luckytown.org Errors-To: owner-luckytown-digest@luckytown.org Precedence: bulk LuckyTown Digest Wednesday, August 14 2002 Volume 09 : Number 068 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: SNL [Tom Mohr ] MSG Review ["Zur, John Francis, JR (John)" ] MSG [A1pump@aol.com] luckytown email glitchig ["Kevin Kinder" ] Re: LuckyTown Digest V9 #66 ["Matej Krajnc" ] Very good piece about the offstage Bruce [jp ] need advice about general admission [Karin ] Bruce in the New York Resident [mark rifkin ] Springsteen Hosted By Koppel (The Reliable Source, Washington Post) [Bar] Re: LuckyTown Digest V9 #67 ["Nadeau, J-G" ] Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 19:33:15 -0400 [Yleana Martinez Subject: SNL Don't know if this has been reported here yet -- Pollstar says: > > Sat > 10/05/02 > New York, NY > "Saturday Night Live" http://www.pollstar.com/tour/searchall.pl?By=Artist&Content=springsteen TWM - -- _____ Are You a Real American? http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2002/07/01/tomo/index.html _____ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 21:25:06 -0400 From: "Zur, John Francis, JR (John)" Subject: MSG Review 8/12/02...Up there with some of the BEST Springsteen shows I've ever seen! The beauty of these shows is that Bruce is playing/singing with the same (if not more) intensity & passion than at any other point in his career. It reminds me a lot of the Darkness tour - I bought the album a week before the 1st Bruce show I ever saw & was so taken, that I ended up going to 3 more shows over the next couple of months. Mixing the Darkness songs with the Rising songs really works well because of the angst, tone & hopelessness as well as hopefulness of the songs. From the opening of the Rising thru LOHAD, Bruce's intensity never wavered - he has a msg & a purpose & has really found his "voice". The show has passion, fun and above all - spirituality. As the Time magazine article put it: "Listening to The Rising is better than a month of going to church" - well, seeing a show from the Rising tour is better than a year of going to church! The Rising songs and their live interpretations will eventually go down as some of the best songs Bruce has ever written. Highlights: Lonesome Day The Fuse (do not take a bathroom break during this song or you will miss out what may be the best song of the night) Empty Sky You're Missing World's Apart 41 Shots Into The Fire Glory Days My City of Ruins BIUSA LOHAD Keep playing the new CD & do whatever you can to get a ticket to one of these shows - they will be remembered as fondly as the Darkness Tour. I've been fortunate enough to see him in Asbury on 7/30, CAA on 8/7 and MSG on 8/12 and will do whatever I can to get into the Philly show and may even fly out to another city to catch him... John Z jzur@lucent.com ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 19:27:34 EDT From: A1pump@aol.com Subject: MSG Was only able to get one ticket for MSG and gave it to my wife. Also sent her some LuckyTown Digests. She sent me this I was re-reading some of the posts re: the current tour. As someone who has been profoundly affected by the events of 9/11, I was hoping the concert would somehow provide a catharsis. It didn't, but it came close. The new songs had greater impact musically and emotionally performed live and the old songs took on a new meaning in this context. That they (Promised Land and Darkness--the latter expressed at times with pain and remorse) resonate anew in these times and not as nostalgia shows they are truly classics. When I saw Dylan on 11/19/01, it was important to me that he comment in some way on the tragedy. Bruce has said it with his music and his lack of banter with the audience gave the lyrics added impact. He said "New York, I've been thinking about you" and in the space of 2 1/2 hours eloquently expressed the sadness and anger and the need to persevere and go on with life. "Lonesome Day" was spiritual--although I didn't like the choreography of the band during the song, because it wasn't "party time"--Bruce raising his arms as he almost chanted "It's all right", let us know all our feelings are bonafide, including the desire to press on, despite the bitterness and pain. He gave everything he had--he was hoarse when he spoke at the end of the concert, though his voice was still strong. It was emotionally fulfilling and came full circle, carefully calibrated to raise our emotions and settle us down, and to celebrate life. As he says, "hard times come to us all"--Bruce has always celebrated the spirit that keeps us going. He was true to his convictions, keeping us aware of the hungry, the needy, the attack on our civil rights that are coming from our own government ("Born in the USA" took on a new meaning--not just the anger of the disenfranchised but the scream of an American asserting his stake in this country). I thought I heard some rumbling when he began "American Skin" but he sang it forcefully and at least got the audience's attention if not the biggest applause of the night. Bruce has been with us through the good times--he's helped us party--last night, he helped us grieve and rejoice. My sole ticket was precious to me and the experience unforgetable. So to those people who quibble about the song selection, the length of the concert, comparing the new to the old...they should appreciate the gift given to them. [text/html attachment deleted] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2002 09:45:49 -0500 From: "Kevin Kinder" Subject: luckytown email glitchig Since my ISP moved luckytown.org to a new server in mid-July, there have been sporadic problems with email delivery; frequently the digests don't make it out to the entire list because the mailer dies. I'm aware of the problems and will be doing some hefty software upgrades and changes to try to fix things. If you happen to miss some of the digests, they can be found on the web: http://www.luckytown.org/luckytown-digest.html http://www.luckytown.org/luckytown-ads-digest.html Sorry for any inconvenience. - ----- Kevin Kinder kinder@luckytown.org ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 14:31:50 +0200 From: "Matej Krajnc" Subject: Re: LuckyTown Digest V9 #66 Hi, anyone interested in a book of Bruce's songs in Slovenian language? I did my best in 2000. It comes with an extensive essay. www.geocities.com/kud_stempihar While many of you probably never wondered even where Slovenia is located, lemme tell you it's not *THAT* far away. You just might come over to visit the country and take a better look sometime. You won't be dissappointed. Just another thing: I don't think that it's a smart idea to waste the time and precious LTD place to wonder where the hell did Bruce get the intro to City Of Ruins from. It doesn't matter anyway, it's just a great song. Bob Dylan once said that all the songs had already been written, so why worry about something that sounds familiar. Keep on goin'!!! I wish everybody a very outstanding week! Matej from Slovenia ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 12:14:06 -0400 From: jp Subject: Very good piece about the offstage Bruce The Boss rules (the man, that is) From Tuesday's (8/13) Boston Globe. http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/225/living/The_Boss_rules_the_man_that_is_+.shtml By Renee Graham, Globe Staff, 8/13/2002 I'm not a Bruce Springsteen fan. Oh, if I happen upon ''Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out'' or ''Glory Days'' on the radio, I'll crank it, but I'm not sure grunting along to a couple of songs qualifies me for even minor fandom. I've never had a desire to see him in concert, although friends who have insist it's tantamount to a spiritual awakening. I don't own any of his albums - not ''Born in the U.S.A.'' or ''Darkness on the Edge of Town,'' or ''The River.'' And even if I could sing, I couldn't warble a single line from ''Badlands'' or ''Rosalita.'' But I love Bruce Springsteen. Let the fans who've screamed themselves hoarse yelping ''Bruuuuuuuuuuce!'' argue about whether ''Nebraska'' was better than ''The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle'' or whether they prefer the cult hero of 1975's ''Born to Run'' to the pop icon he became after his multimillion-selling breakthrough, ''Born in the U.S.A.'' in 1984. In an increasingly perverse pop culture landscape, I just love the fact that an artist such as Springsteen can still exist. It isn't just that Springsteen has always shunned such social virulence as homophobia, racism, and misogyny in his lyrics - you could say the same thing about the Backstreet Boys. While most contemporary musicians are preoccupied with myopic visions of the world - their jewelry, their lousy childhood, their sexual prowess - Springsteen has never wavered in his desire to sing the song of the disenfranchised and disregarded. For three decades, this beloved son of New Jersey has built a singular career - not to mention a catalog of classics - telling the stories of those most would rather forget, whether it's been Vietnam veterans, factory workers, or people struggling with AIDS. On his latest CD, ''The Rising,'' which topped the Billboard 200 after selling more than 500,000 copies in its debut week, Springsteen considers the aftershocks of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Without stooping to rah-rah jingoism, his songs offer salve to a nation still trying to comprehend what happened on that sunny Tuesday morning, even as the first anniversary approaches. Only Springsteen could pull it off. It made perfect sense that he was the first performer on last year's ''America: A Tribute to Heroes'' telethon, which aired less than two weeks after the attacks. As Springsteen sang ''My City of Ruins,'' one didn't need to be a rabid fan of the man long called ''The Boss'' to understand what a calming, centering influence he was, especially in those first anxious weeks. He articulated a nation's pain and confusion, and with the song's chorus ''Come on, rise up,'' chanted a prayer to elevate us from the ashes. Unlike U2's Bono, who spends as much time telling us how he intends to save the world as he actually spends attempting to do so, Springsteen just goes about his business, putting his heart into his songs. Strip away the anthemic bombast of ''Born in the U.S.A.'' - which if Ronald Reagan and his advisers had bothered to do they never would have tried to use the song for the 1984 presidential campaign - and it's an elegy about the broken American dreams of the misbegotten, and who can't relate to that? He has written with unadorned eloquence about murder - those committed out of selfish amusement such as the killers in ''Nebraska,'' or in drunken desperation like the laid-off auto worker in ''Johnny 99.'' Yet unlike those who glorify violence, Springsteen, like one of his idols Johnny Cash, has always considered the consequences of pointing a gun and pulling the trigger. Springsteen has used his energy and talents to speak out against apartheid as a part of Artists United Against Apartheid; the dangers of nuclear power at 1979's ''No Nukes'' concerts; and political persecution at benefits for Amnesty International. And, despite raising the ire of police officers and then Mayor Rudy Giuliani, he sang ''American Skin (41 Shots),'' about the 1999 New York police shooting death of unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo. It remains a powerful artist statement about that shameful episode. I love Springsteen because his hungry heart has always been in the right place. He hasn't so much followed a political agenda as his own clear sense of humanity. In these days when many mainstream musicians are willing to do anything to sell albums, Springsteen has always managed to stand up for and represent the better angels of our nature. And even if I never listen to his music, I'll always be eager to hear what Springsteen has to say about the world and ourselves. - -- jp AOL IM "Plunkman99" ICQ # 7157610 "Walk tall, or baby don't walk at all." ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 12:38:16 -0500 From: Karin Subject: need advice about general admission Hello everyone! I would love to hear some tips, dos and don'ts, for the best time with GA tickets. I'm not that experienced of a festival type concert goer and would like some insight. What time are people lining up to get in? How is it going standing during all that time? (I stand for most of his concerts anyway, so I'm not too worried about it) How are people behaving? Is it as much fun as it sounds like it's going to be? Is it worth the floor area if you are not up close? I wasn't able to get the GA tickets for my city before they sold out last Saturday but I think I will get them somehow. I could have bought seats but I really want to get up close so I'm holding out. I can't believe I didn't get them because everyone around me was absolutely adamant that they get seats and were not interested in the floor which they considered was for "younger" people. Hey, I'm 34... not that young, but the floor just sounds like a lot of fun! I was able to be in row 3 for TGOTJ and row 7 for the reunion tour and I just can't live with sitting back far away anymore.... well, I could if I had to.... :-) Thanks, Karin ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 20:38:56 -0400 From: mark rifkin Subject: Bruce in the New York Resident One of the cool things about being an editor at a New York City paper ("New York Resident," Manhattan's largest local news magazine) is that I get to choose what goes on the cover, so for this week's issue, I put on that sometime NYC resident, Bruce Springsteen. I got an artist friend of mine to create a cool piece of original art for the cover, and we have a coupla stories and pix, including my overall evaluation of the album and media blitz so far. If you're in the city, pick up a copy--it's free. If you're not in the city, the paper should be online soon at http://www.resident.com, and my column is called "Riffin' in the City." The media column is about Bruce as well. And if you hit on the "This Week in New York" icon, you will also find my "official" reviews of the album and opening-night show. That should be up tomorrow on the site. - --magicrat1994 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2002 01:04:13 -0500 From: Barry Kaplovitz Subject: Springsteen Hosted By Koppel (The Reliable Source, Washington Post) From The Washington Post August 14, 2002 The Reliable Source By Lloyd Grove . . . In yesterday's item about Ted Koppel at Saturday's Bruce Springsteen concert, the ABC News icon buried the lead. Buried it six feet under. Koppel was mum about it, but we heard from multiple sources yesterday that the Boss was his overnight guest at the bucolic waterfront Koppel estate in St. Mary's County, Md., and that the next day, Koppel himself chauffeured Springsteen to Washington. The modest television star shyly didn't return our call yesterday. . . . To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14736-2002Aug13.html ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 19:40:44 -0400 From: "Nadeau, J-G" Subject: Re: LuckyTown Digest V9 #67 "John Moye" wrote >2. He still needs to find a better way to wrap up the show. The >Countin on a Miracle>>41 Shots>>Into The Fire just doesn't seem to >do the trick. Do you really think this is the wrapping up of the show? Or just a break before the following part of the show? It is cute to think that the following songs are encore, but it does not sound like this to me. The (planned) wrapping up of the show occurs with the Encore 2: My City of Ruins>>Born in the USA>>Land of Hope and Dreams. Jean Guy ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 19:33:15 -0400 From: Yleana Martinez Subject: Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 19:33:15 -0400 Tramps-- Did anyone see a story in the Boston Globe reporting that Bruce is "expected" to be on hand for the Oct. 4 Lenny Zakim Peace Bridge dedication? It's the same day as his show at the Fleet Center--for which I did NOT score tickets (!!!). If anyone has any scoop about this, please post to the LTD. Thanks. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 11:15:25 -0500 From: Barry Kaplovitz Subject: Review: 'Thanks, Boss' (David Segal, The Washington Post) The Washington Post August 12, 2002 Thanks, Boss By David Segal Washington Post Staff Writer Lordy, lordy, we needed that. We needed Bruce Springsteen even more than we thought, and we thought we needed him a lot. On Saturday night at MCI Center, the Boss and the merry posse of musicians called the E Street Band came not merely to rock, but to heal. And heal they did, in a 2 1/2-hour show that roused emotions spanning the full scope of human experience - -- from grief, despair and resignation to rapture, affirmation and hope. It's unlikely that any audience in rock's history has been compelled to ride from such brooding depths to such giddy heights. At moments, the crowd was hushed quiet by Springsteen and urged to soak up his new compositions about the tragedy of Sept. 11 in reverential silence. Other times, the show became a five-keg house party with all the furniture tossed on the lawn. The peak arrived during one of a half-dozen encores, when the arena lights went up and "Born to Run" was untethered in a 50-million-watt glare. Only a substance banned by the FDA could make that many people any happier. There's always been ample emotional bandwidth to Springsteen's shows, but not to these extremes. It was as if he had decided he wouldn't merely assert that the country will recover from the wounds of Sept. 11 -- one theme of his latest CD, "The Rising" -- but that he would enact that recovery before our eyes. Nearly half of the songs performed were from "The Rising," and most of those fared better live than on the album. In some instances that's because they were scaled up and in others because they were scaled down. The chorus of "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" seems as thin as a nursery rhyme in your living room ("I'm waitin', waitin' on a sunny day / Gonna chase the clouds away"), but bulked into a singalong by fans, the point of its simplicity seems suddenly clear. Conversely, other songs were stripped clean of the overwrought production that so mismatched topic and sound on the album. "Empty Sky" was performed with nothing more than Springsteen's guitar, his harmonica and backup harmonies with his wife, Patti Scialfa. The song is the anguished testimony of a man whose soul mate is suddenly gone; unplugged on Saturday night, the tune took on the bereft, ravaged feel it deserves. Minus the hoopla of a whole band -- which supersized the pathos right out of the album version -- the narrator's loss seemed far more compelling. A couple of "Rising" songs couldn't be revived, even with Springsteen defibrillating them with all his considerable might. "The Fuse" flopped the hardest. The song mixes images of a sexual romp with some unnamed dreadful force and winds up an R-rated muddle. You couldn't help but squirm a bit when Springsteen sang "your bittersweet taste on my tongue," particularly because the MCI video monitors at that moment showed him and Scialfa in a split screen. The first half of the show interspersed "Rising" with a half-dozen songs from "Darkness on the Edge of Town," Springsteen's intensely bleak and thoroughly stirring 1978 followup to "Born to Run." It was the most interesting and inspired choice of the night -- reaching back more than two decades to showcase an album that is hardly his most popular. The material seemed so alive and so relevant that, at moments, you got the sense that Bruce wrote a better album about Sept. 11 some 24 years ago. "Darkness" is all about shattered characters struggling to reassemble themselves in a world that is terrifyingly low on mercy. The title track, which was the third song performed in Saturday's show, is a howl for love by a man in full retreat, both physically and mentally. "I lost my faith and I lost my wife," Springsteen sang on Saturday night, substituting the word "faith" for "money," which is in the original. Songs like "The Promised Land" and "Prove It All Night" took on a new resonance, as did the opening lines to "Badlands": "Lights out tonight / Trouble in the heartland / Got a head-on collision smashin' in my guts, man / I'm caught in a cross-fire that I don't understand." Of course, when Springsteen wrote these songs he didn't have terrorism on his mind, but rather the turmoil caused by the fame earned through "Born to Run," the album that truly launched him. But in 1978, he captured something timeless. The protagonists of "Darkness" have been savaged by life and they'd like to savage something back, but they have no idea where to start. It's a response to the attacks of 9/11 that seems, if anything, more plausible than the aggrieved voices of "The Rising," who lament their spouseless lives with a passivity that is hard to fathom. On the topic of Sept. 11, little was said directly on Saturday night. Actually, Springsteen didn't say much of anything through the show, aside from heartfelt if perfunctory hellos and goodbyes, band introductions, a plug for local food banks and a call to vigilantly watch anyone seeking to roll back civil rights. Story time once took up a quarter of a Springsteen show, and the last time he came through town -- when he reunited the E Street Band three years ago -- he spent perhaps 10 minutes sermonizing about the power of rock. This was a less whimsical production, one intuitively aware that rock inspired by an act of mass murder is different from rock about anything else. Springsteen, above all else, is a performer preternaturally connected to his audience. On Saturday night he found the right combination of first aid and entertainment. The intensity was leavened occasionally with upbeat hits, but only toward the end of the show. After 90 minutes entirely focused on cuts from "The Rising" and "Darkness," Springsteen got festive with "Glory Days," one of the pure pop moments of the night. Versions of "Thunder Road" and "Bobby Jean" highlighted the restorative power of nostalgia. Toward the end of the night, he got to "Born in the U.S.A." recalling the first time Springsteen turned a national tragedy -- Vietnam, in that instance -- into arena rock. Through it all, the E Street Band never broke a sweat and never broke character. Everyone in this group brings something to what often feels like the hippest, happiest family barbecue you were ever invited to crash. Clarence Clemons is the guy on his third burger whose laugh can be heard three houses down. Max Weinberg is the slightly stiff middle manager who's one beer from turning his napkin into a hat. Little Stevie Van Zandt, dressed like a Gypsy at a wake, is the goofy uncle who keeps cheek-pinching the children. Backup singer and acoustic guitarist Scialfa flirts with her husband and gives the festivities both a homey touch and an erotic edge. Violinist Soozie Tyrell, added for this tour, seemed like somebody's comely young niece. And there's the quiet crowd: guitarist Nils Lofgren, keyboardists Roy Bittan and Danny Federici, and bassist Gary Tallent, the buddies you met in high school whom no party would be the same without. The affection these people and Bruce feel for one another is either genuine or convincingly contrived. They do things like share microphones for close harmony parts even though there are microphones to spare onstage, giving the group a sloppy, all-for-one vibe. They seem to love their jobs and they seem fond of their Boss. Springsteen's band introductions were the only moments of outright comedy all night. "The result of a menage à trois between Keith Moon, Buddy Rich and Ed McMahon!" he shouted, introducing Weinberg. "The illegitimate son of Jerry Lee Lewis and Liberace!" he bellowed, introducing Bittan. Before asking Clemons to take a bow, he told the audience simply, "You wish you could be like him, but you can't!" Clarence didn't get much air time on "The Rising," so for much of the show he was relegated to knocking together a variety of percussive instruments, including a pair of Middle Eastern thumb cymbals on "Worlds Apart." But whenever he squared up to reprise an old sax solo, the results were Pavlovian. His contributions to "Thunder Road" and "The Promised Land" had grown men trading high-fives. On "The Rising," Bittan snares most of the audio space vacated by Clemons, a weird choice considering that guitarists outnumber keyboardists in this band by three to one. (Four if you count Scialfa.) For a lot of the album, there's barely any strumming at all. On Saturday night, the guitarists reasserted themselves. Occasionally you could actually hear Lofgren, who, by the way, looks more like Springsteen's Mini-Me every year. Little Stevie got to noodle and mug with a mandolin. Most of the finest solos belonged to Springsteen, though. He seemed especially glad to reprise, note for note, the distress signals that screech throughout the songs of "Darkness." His guitar playing is only the beginning of what makes Springsteen such a stupefying spectacle. Measured in terms of charisma, energy and fan affection, who can touch him? When a rock star reaches 52, you're obliged to mention his age and then comment about how vital he is, given his advancing years. But the years have barely laid a glove on Springsteen as a live performer. He bounds around less than he once did, and he's certainly too rich to actually be the regular-guy-in-flannels he seems onstage. No matter. Rock is his religion and for as long as he ministers, his flock will know a thing or two about faith. To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6742-2002Aug11.html ------------------------------ End of LuckyTown Digest V9 #68 ****************************** ********************************************************************* ** 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.