Bruce Springsteen: How The Boss Found A New Home On Broadway
Thursday, 22 March 2018
Written by Huw Baines
Bruce Springsteen’s Broadway run is about to take its final curtain, and will go down as one of the largest undertakings in a career partly defined by large undertakings. What began as a curio has become an important chapter in one of modern rock’s most engaging stories. Huw Baines was in New York at the start of the residency and found a show that made sense as the Boss’s next step.
A guitar and a microphone are among the world’s great levellers: tools of a trade that point the way out of cul-de-sacs or one horse towns. Very few people embody that ideal better than Bruce Springsteen. The Boss. The leader of the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, hard-rocking, booty-shaking, love-making, earth-quaking, Viagra-taking, justifying, death-defying, legendary E-Street Band, who’ll race you in the street, walk with you out on the wire.
For millions, he’s always been the guy who can haul them up from the canvas. Can’t start a fire without a spark, right? We take that from him, just as we give it back every time we pack a stadium. But on stage at the Walter Kerr theatre, yards from the bright, glaring lights of New York’s Broadway, Springsteen stands alone. He moves slowly and deliberately, his steps betraying years of leaving it all on the field night after night. He stops us from clapping along. This time he wants us to listen.
When reading Born to Run, Springsteen’s recent autobiography, it was quickly apparent in its machine gun excitement and liberal use of caps lock that he’d quite like to tell us some of his stories face-to-face. This is his chance. But the book also shone a light on the artifice at the heart of his music: the working class hero who’d never held a steady job, the street racer without a driving licence. “I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud,” ran its first line. “So am I.”
So is everyone sat in the stalls, so is everyone peering down from the circle. To differing extents we’re all liars, grifters and hucksters. And, in most cases, we’re our own marks. We like to think that we’re a little more important than we are. Or a little more successful. A little more adventurous. That we're loners or rebels.
Maybe we like to think that we’re not like our parents, or our siblings. That we’re not like the lifers at work. But we are. We devote ourselves to jobs that don’t make sense beyond their place in a capitalist jigsaw puzzle, we find warning signs in our behaviour. We cancel plans and turn on the TV. Walk with you on the wire? It’s late. It’s dark out.
That is why Springsteen’s particular brand of fraud is so vital. We’re all in the same boat, but for 40 years his music has been a means of escape. It started as a tangible way out for him—the dreamer who papered over cracks at home by obsessively building a craft and persona — but it became an important release for us.
He is often working in his songs —to get his hands clean, at his daddy’s garage— but he’s never been been on a production line, waited tables or sweated over a construction job. Still, he soaked up his surroundings, listened to people and gave a shit: he found a way to inhabit those spaces and document the kitchen sink stuff along with the grit, misery, romance, hopes and dreams. His became a voice of experience, if not always personal specifics.
His stadium-sized, four hours and counting pick-me-ups have their beginnings in New Jersey, in the people around him during his youth and the “never-say-die, never-give-up, salt-of-the-earth essence” he calls Jersey Soul. As a show— and it is a show, with a capital S—Springsteen on Broadway captures this particularly well.
His stories of home, of his father’s depression, of friends lost on foreign fields, of excitement, disappointment, and Clarence Clemons, are stripped of most of their bombast. There aren’t any windmilling histrionics, absolutely no knee-slides. What’s left is the story of a fragile kid who made it out, the talent that allowed him to do so, and the people who were there to pick up the slack.
The best tall tales always begin with the truth. All the better if it’s a truth that more than a handful of people can understand. From his love of Pete Seeger to his own mythologising of the Jersey Shore, Springsteen’s songs have always felt like part of the oral tradition. They’re not terribly ambiguous —some would call them earnest and a little on the nose. But they do the basics: character, time, place, plot. The songs he has selected for this run bear that out, and they’re an interesting bunch.
There are the megastars — Born to Run, Thunder Road, Born in the USA, Dancing in the Dark — but they’re made to work for their place on the running order. There’s no room for several big hitters that would, on paper at least, seem like bankers in this setting— The River, Atlantic City, perhaps Darkness on the Edge of Town— because Springsteen’s telling his story his way, not the way we might want to hear it.
The Wish, for example, is nobody’s idea of an essential Springsteen song. It calls the ‘Tracks’ box set home and is an average-to-quite-good moment of Americana. But on Broadway it feels like a vital cog in the mechanics of the evening.
Its sentimental stock-taking is an emotional payoff that needs to be delivered and a direct link to several important passages in Born to Run: “Last night we all sat around laughing at the things that guitar brought us. And I lay awake thinking ‘bout the other things it’s brought us.”
‘Nebraska’, that great underperformed work, gets a single song: the narratively important My Father’s House. Born in the USA becomes a bluesy trudge that shouts out Ron Kovic and settles a score with its Republican appropriators. Springsteen has words of love for Clarence over Tenth Avenue Freeze Out, he has pointed ones for his country post-Charlottesville that echo from the night’s second song, My Hometown.
Tougher Than The Rest and Brilliant Disguise—duets with his wife, E-Street bandmember Patti Scialfa—are magical. The latter’s chorus seems to tie a bow around so much of what he’s trying to say: “Tell me who I see, when I look in your eyes.” All these songs are points plotted on a timeline.
It’s all held together, of course, by his magnetism as a performer. Even in this quiet, sometimes subdued, setting he has the audience on a string. There’s a moment towards the end of The Promised Land when he steps around the microphone and finishes the song without amplification. It’s enough to remind you why it’s worth having heroes and why it's worth knowing the power of escapism.
It’s like Joe Strummer said: “Just when you need some spirit & some proof that the big wide world exists, the DJ puts on Racing in the Streets & life seems worth living again…life seems to be in Cinemascope again.”
Huw Baines is the editor of Stereoboard. He's on Twitter.
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