Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Springsteen at the Sports Arena

Caught Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at the LA Sports Arena last night. Great show, although not up to the standards of the shows I saw back in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Sports Arena is a crumbling old relic, with antiquated facilities, and horrible acoustics. I wondered aloud why Springsteen chose to play in this small venure. A woman next to me said she had read an interview in which Springsteen dissed the Stapes Center as being sterile and corporate (all those skyboxes?). Maybe so, but Springsteen’s art suffered as a result. The sound quality was, at best, okay. Lots of distortion as the music bounced off all those hard concrete surfaces. The Arena also was hotter than Hades. Which was okay, because so was the band.

The show opened with blazing versions of Radio Nowhere and, a personal favorite, No Surrender. Then a string of songs from the new album: Lonesome Day, Gypsy Biker, and Magic. The latter was preceded by what the first of what I gather has become nightly political rants. Both rants felt scripted and unauthentic. Just as Springsteen’s working class hero facade was a deliberate construct engineered by Jon Landau, Springsteen’s political statements seem a self-concious effort in branding.

Landau insinuated himself into Bruce’s artistic life and consciousness (while remaining on the Rolling Stone masthead) until he became Springsteen’s producer, manager, and full-service Svengali. Unlike the down-on-their-luck Springsteens of Freehold, N.J., Landau hailed from the well-appointed suburbs of Boston and had earned an honors degree in history from Brandeis. He filled his new protégé’s head with an American Studies syllabus heavy on John Ford, Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor. ... Springsteen’s image similarly transformed. On the cover of Darkness, he looks strangely like the sallower cousin of Pacino’s Sonny Wortzik, the already quite sallow anti-hero of Dog Day Afternoon. The message was clear: Springsteen himself was one of the unbeautiful losers, flitting along the ghostly fringes of suburban respectability.

Anyway, the show then shifted gears with an old favorite from Nebraska, Reason to Believe, which sparkled in a new arrangement for the 10 piece band. It’s interesting how he can turn the country feel of the Nebraska version into a Born in the USA-esque rocker. A searing version of Candy’s Room followed.

The second political rant followed, this time even longer. Cleverly, Springsteen then lightened the mood with a hard-driving pop-rock arrangement of Living in the Future in which the music matytered much more than the words.

Interestingly, here in one of the bluest towns of one of the bluest states, folks mostly sat through the political songs, while surging to their feet for the pop classics. In fairness, however, this was probably not a political statement by the audience so much as our geriatric preferences for the old songs we grew up with.

Anyway, the show wound on through The Promised Land, Town Called Heartbreak, Backstreets, Working On The Highway, Devil’s Arcade, The Rising (which seemed to especially suffer from the lousy acoustics), Last To Die, a brilliant rendition of Long Walk Home, and finally a rousing, crowd sing along version of Badlands. The 18,000 (?) fan chorus sounded great.

At 18 songs, the main show was a lot shorter than the famous shows of my youth. But we’re all getting up there. Bruce repeatedly soaked himself with wet towels. Clarence Clemons actually sat through a number of the slower numbers. Has he had health problems? And Danny Federici looked thin and frail. I was not a fan of the ”other band,” but one had to wonder how much the E Streeters have left in the tank. Will this prove to be a farewell tour?

Speaking of looks, with his current hair style, Bruce looked a little like Keith Richards. Actually, when the camera was below face level, looking up, he looked a lot like Keith Richards. Scary.

Anyway, the five song intermission was the highlight of the show. Girls In Their Summer Clothes was a crowd favorite, with much of the audience singing along. It was pretty much the only song of the new material that really got the crowd rocking. An old encore standby, Thundercrack, was preceded by Bruce telling a story about playing in LA in 1973. It was the first time any of the E Street Band had been on an airplane. The record company flew them out to do a showcase. Bruce quipped that Thundercrack was “supposed to be our big showstopper. Unfortunately, the show stopped before we played it.” The long rendition of Thundercrack sequed into a medium-fast version of Born To Run. Dancing In The Dark followed, which was one of the high lights of the show. Long, rocking, and with lots of interaction between the band members, including a cute moment when Bruce pretended to go to sleep on Nils Lofgren’s shoulder. Nils, by the way, seems to have shrunk! He seemed even more elfin than usual. He also played brilliantly. There’s really no excuse for letting Steve Van Zandt have any solos with Nils on stage.

The show closed with a sing-a-long version of American Land. A lof of Bruce fans are probably old enough to remember Sing along with Mitch, the old Mitch Miller TV show that ran the lyrics along the bottom fothe screen so that you could, as the title put it, sing along. During American land, Bruce had the lyrics run along the bottom of the jumbotron screens.

There were some old favorites missing. Rosalita, Thunder Road, and Jungleland, which used to be concert standards, were especially conspicuous by their absence.

All in all, however, it was a great show. If this does turn out to be a farewell tour, I’m glad I had the chance to relive a bit of my youth with one of my favorite bands.