It’s a bitter pill to swallow for those of us old farts who grew up inculcated with a zealous belief in the (scuse me while I remove my dentures) insurgent and inspiring potency of music, but a recent interview with E-Street band guitarist Steve Van Zandt got this writer thinking about how rock ‘n’ roll became a mere adjunct of the leisure industry, lagging behind computer games, mobile phones and sundry other gizmos and gadgets designed to milk the pockets of our pop kids.

Van Zandt was blooded in Jersey bars, served endless stints in bands who drilled themselves on garage rock, British invasion acts, Motown and first generation children-of-the-bomb rock ‘n’ roll. Such pups learned their songs well before they started singing. Like apprentice artists, they spent years copying the masters and learning the craft before thinking about writing a song of their own. They earned their stripes in joints where the audience was utterly mercenary, and understood that in order to hold a crowd, you had to grab them by the throats and make them dance.
This summer, Bruce and the E-Street Band played an epic show in Dublin’s RDS and managed, as always, to reduce a stadium show to the dimensions of a club. They are the last of a dwindling breed, musicians who can break the two-hour barrier and still leave the mob wanting more.
Contrast this with your average band of bright young things who are signed before they can play, from the womb untimely ripped as it were, are chaperoned through the recording process by producers for hire, babied and coddled by Pro-Tools, and fail to develop the chops or performance skills required to hold a crowd.
Hence the restructuring of the festival experience over the last decade. Most acts run out of puff before the first hour is up, so the bill is arranged like a variety show or revue, a deli tray revolving stage featuring a cast of thousands. Tethered to the contraints of computerised lighting rigs, pre-programmed autopilot mixes and triggered samples, the acts are unable to deviate from the set-list, and so deliver the same show night after night until they’re bored and burnt out.
Rock bands now settle for the niche market instead of the popular consciousness. They expect rather than work for the crowd’s attentions, the equivalent of dead poets reading untranslated Latin epigraphs in sonorous voices and expecting their constituents to go home happy having breathed the same rarified air. Rock ‘n’ roll has become the poetry of popular culture. It leaves the dressing room believing the bout has been fixed, so it throws the fight, whether asked to or not.