Serious Springsteen Leaves Madison Square Garden Audience Euphoric

NYT: Music Review
Springsteen Leaves Garden Audience Euphoric
By JON PARELES
Published: October 19, 2007

The Madison Square Garden crowd joyfully sang along with Bruce Springsteen, not for the first or last time, on Wednesday night, as he reached the chorus of “Lonesome Day”: “It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right, yeah.” That’s what the sound of the E Street Band always says, surging past every bit of disillusionment, loss, bewilderment and bitterness in the verses that the fans also know.

The sheer vitality of Mr. Springsteen, 58, belting an entire set of showstoppers straight from the gut and working the stage with his longtime band, provides all the hope the lyrics struggle to find. He’s as serious as any public figure alive, but he leaves audiences euphoric — a paradox that only grows more profound as he endures.

The music Mr. Springsteen makes with the E Street Band is grounded in the invincible sound of the pop he grew up on, particularly Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. It echoes the glory days of early rock ’n’ roll and an America that, after World War II and before Vietnam, was prosperous, confident and outwardly unified. His favorite chord progressions hark back to doo-wop; so do the saxophone tags of Clarence Clemons. There’s camaraderie in the music and among the musicians; the video screens above the stage would constantly intercut close-ups of the band members with their boss.

Even when those old chords carry lyrics that are far more troubled than girl-group love songs, and even when songs expand into anthems and suites (like “Thundercrack,” the encore Mr. Springsteen revived from his barnstorming live shows in the early 1970s), the music itself harbors no doubts, no second thoughts.

Yet for decades Mr. Springsteen has sung about a world that grinds down dreams and betrays the promise of America. More than six years into the second Bush administration, he is open about his political anger. He introduced “Magic,” the title song from his new album, with a comment about our “Orwellian times,” when “what’s true can be made to seem like a lie and what’s lying can be made to seem true.” Playing the jovial M.C. while the band vamped the intro to another song from the album, “Livin’ in the Future,” he started out naming “things that we love about America, like cheeseburgers, the Jersey Shore, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution,” and went on to warn about the “rolling back of civil rights” and “sleeping through all those changes that shouldn’t have happened here.”...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/arts/music/18cnd-springsteen.html

Bruce was always something special. He was so obviously having fun on the stage along with e-street that the vibe carried into the audience and several miles beyond. Good for him speaking out through his music - that's the way it's supposed to be. I grew up on folk music that spoke of social issues. Music that makes you think about what's going on around you - nothing like it.