Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band

Item: Live in New York City
Author: Steve Stockman

Live in New York City

(2001)

Reviewed by Steve Stockman

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Label Columbia RecordsThe Phantom Tollbooth2001

heartland rock rock

In some ways I have been waiting for this album for some time and in other ways I knew how much of an anticlimax it would be. I've been scouring bootleg bins (shame on me) in the hope of a good quality record of the last tour that I thoroughly enjoyed when I saw it in Dublin. So that Columbia decided to release an official album of the first E Street Band tour in over a decade pleases me, as it means I pay less money and take no risk with the sound quality.

However this is not the Bruce that I love. Yes, it's great to hear and the live-action photos in the booklet remind you of its energy, sweat and emotional power and make you long for another night of it. But, let's not kid ourselves, it's overly pompous and not the kind of record that you are going to put on repeat on your lounge, nor does it highlight the genius that is Bruce Springsteen. "Ramrod," "Out On the Streets," "My Love Will Not Let You Down," and "Don't Look Back" are rockers that can bounce a stadium but they are hardly the evidence of a songwriting talent. We've already had the "Live Box Set," even though it was released 15 years ago, and then the "Unplugged" album that probably should have given us what we should have had by now, an acoustic reworking of the very best rhymes and melodies in the vastest of rock canons. We are thankful for "Born In The USA" to only have a newly worked acoustic arrangement of the title track, a setting that keeps it much closer to its meaning than the fist clenched stomper of '85. An acoustic "Dancing In The Dark" might have sucked the ridiculousness of that compromised sell-out of an embarrassing shimmy with Courteney Cox. The brilliant Tom Joad Tour was what should have been given to us--not this.

So why did I almost spend £35 on a bootleg of a tour that I wasn't wildly fussed on hearing outside the stadium itself? "Land of Hope and Dreams" is the answer. An unreleased track that was almost a closing hymn on the tour and a song that left the fans anticipating a new E Street Band-backed album that would bring the great songwriting of Tom Joad together with the great rock sounds of "Born To Run" and "Darkness On the Edge of Town." That two years after that Dublin gig we are getting a live album suggests that it will be yet another year before Bruce brings out a studio album. That would make it two new studio albums in a decade. I'm glad he is enjoying family life, but come on Mr. Blue Collar Man, sort it out.

At least we get "Land of Hope and Dreams" and another new song, "41 Shots," a little incendiary of controversy as it is written about the NYPD shooting dead an unarmed African American. This is another teaser of a song that suggests that the next album will rank as a band album to rate with "Nebraska," "Tunnel of Love," and "Tom Joad." But where I find myself fascinated is this song of hope and dreams.

It's in the tradition of train songs running down through the folk, blues, Gospel, and Rock genres for the most part of the twentieth century, even though Bruce has travelled mostly in cars during his own particular pilgrimage. If cars have been some symbol of escaping from, trains have been more of an escape to. Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready" is maybe the benchmark and certainly it is closely related to what Bruce is on about here. This is a train heading to a better place, another kingdom where things will be full of...well...hope and dreams. In many ways it is a conglomeration of all that Springsteen has ever been on about. He tells us:

This train...
Carries saints and sinners
This train
Carries losers and winners
This train
Carries whores and gamblers
This train
Carries lost souls
This train
Dreams will not be thwarted
This train
Faith will be rewarded
This train
Hear the steal wheels singing
This train
Bells of freedom ringing...

This train is actually full of every character and song that Springsteen has ever written about. He and Tom Waits have been the two songwriters to most poetize the kind of marginalized people that Jesus sought out and had most time for. They have on the whole given these characters the very sympathy and hope that Jesus did. Here they all are filling the carriages and heading towards the light, leaving all that darkness in albums gone by, heading for the place where the character in the "Ghost of Tom Joad" was waiting for a time "when the first would be last and the last would be first."

Without doubt there has been more spiritual hopefulness in Springsteen's later work but here as so often the redemption does not look upward but in the companionship of the woman by his side:

Darlin if you're weary
Lay your head upon my chest
We'll take what we can carry
And we'll leave the rest

On the tour and on this album, the perfect fulfillment of these sentiments is the other good reason for this album's release; namely, the community version of "If I Should Fall Behind" where everyone takes to the mike for their turn in a way that fills-up with emotions and had me wishing that Church could be like it. Yet, in the end, hopes and dreams and all that we do to help one another can never be enough or surely we would have made it work. Whether Bruce realizes or not surely he is right--only faith will be rewarded. It depends too who we put that faith in.

And here I am, left wondering if this is a review or a spiritual meditation. As a review you can take it from me that this is no definitive Springsteen live album, though it is a reasonable record of the last tour. Spiritual meditation? Well to be truthful, I bought it for just that--those couple or three songs that provoke my soul.