It’s been 18 years since Bruce Springsteen last recorded an album with the E Street Band. To put things in perspective, that’s roughly the same time span that elapsed between Elvis on Ed Sullivan and the release of the Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ.
Springsteen is the boy who believed in rock ‘n’ roll so hard it became real, and thereafter, his landscape changed from a neon boulevard populated by poet hustlers and carny barkers to lunar wastes crawling with gamblers, infidels, factory trash and serial killers. His alchemy worked backwards, changing the glittering prizes of Born To Run into the base metals of Nebraska, a man who at a crucial point decided to stop the Cadillac, get out and drill through the surface of the highway until he found the black and icky blood that courses under America. Soul mining, he calls it.
And now he’s back with the E-Streeters, who individually are the gawkiest, dorkiest bunch ever to shuffle uncomfortably through a photo shoot, but together represent the greatest bar band in heaven or on earth.
Above all, they represent community. When Steve Van Zandt became the Soprano Silvio Dante, he’d already done 20 years of E-Street research about blood, honour, discretion and da family. And here we have them reconvened like brothers and sisters at the funeral of a compadre: Max Weinberg as the somewhat full-of-himself older brother, Gary Tallent the strange, silent uncle, Little Steven the tearaway prodigal son, Patti Scialfa the pretty kid sister.
But the bereavement that brings them back together this time is unfathomable in its magnitude. All but two of the songs on The Rising were written in the shadow of September 11. Last winter, as the cold set in and rock ‘n’ roll seemed about as useful as a paper piss-pot, you could almost hear the voices from the back of Madison Square Gardens hollering, “Bruce, why hast thou forsaken us?” After all, the men and women of the Fire and Police Departments, the rescue workers, the volunteers and the bereaved, weren’t these Springsteen’s people?
But it wasn’t that straightforward. The NYPD had picketed Bruce’s ’99 shows over ‘American Skin’. And while the reunion tour of that year was a triumph, Bruce himself wasn’t sure of his role in rock ‘n’ roll anymore, having spent much of the previous decade reverting to the form he periodically reassumes, that of socialist balladeer and successor to Woody, Bob and Christy Moore.
But then a couple of things happened. A few days after 9/11, Bruce was in a Jersey Shore town when a fan rolled down his car window and shouted, “We need you”. The singer took a look around at the contrast between the self-sacrifice of native New Yorkers and what he called “the theatre of humiliation” on TV and radio, and figured maybe he had something to say again.
The Rising won’t trigger any miracles, but some of it might give you the spiritual wherewithal to at least believe in the possibility of their existence. It’s not an epochal record like Darkness or Nebraska (although with a some sterner editing, it could’ve been). It’s Bruce and the band given a new coat of paint by producer Brendan O’ Brien, who through his work with bands like Pearl Jam, knows a thing or two about gut feeling and mile-high noise.
Cue the opening ‘Lonesome Day’ with its soaring Spector strings – blues in the verses, gospel in the chorus, Sunday morning reprieved by Saturday night. It’s the sound of what happens when Bruce’s drive-all-night loner protagonist of yore finds out that it helps to be around people for a while. The title tune is cut from the same cloth, a natural set opener with a bass drum powering the song out of blues language into a laying-of-hands chorus, all martial rhythms and whistling keyboards; unapologetically anthemic.
Ditto ‘Countin’ On A Miracle’ – one of those river deep, mountain high walls of noise that acts a steroid shot to the soul, Henry Rollins will-to-power meets Bono’s humanitarian idealism – and ‘Into The Fire’, with its prayer of “May your strength give us strength/May your faith give us faith”.
But elsewhere, the record deals in more finely drawn shades of ambiguity, addressing the wrench of loss, whether it’s a hole in the skyline where no hole should be, or the death of next of kin. In ‘Empty Sky’, it starts with a panic attack: “I woke up this morning, I could barely breathe/Just an empty impression in the bed where you used to be”. Then, through a series of subtle modulations and development of lyrical theme, he manages to take the listener across several thousand leagues of feeling in three minutes flat. This tune finds its twin in ‘You’re Missing’, with its muted beat, sawed cello line and a masterful middle-eight that reverses the song’s current without disrupting the flow.
In the third part of this triptych, he’s a ‘Nothing Man’, a ghost come back from the fires to realise that he died so things can stay the same, the Vietnam vet in ‘Born In The USA’ by way of Lennon & McCartney. And like any poet worth his or her salt, Springsteen boils down incomprehensible concepts into a manageable lexicon of the mundane: coffee cups, letterboxes, bed sheets, jackets hanging over chairs.
He gives his pen a little more leeway on the carnal paranoia of ‘The Fuse’, the first Bruce song to meet full on with the fine art of furtive fuckin’: “Tree’s on fire with the first fall’s frost/Long black line in front of Holy Cross/Black moon risin’ in a sky of black dust . . . Tell me baby who do you trust?” In the same dark vein, ‘Further On Up The Road’ is Harry Powell’s tombstone blues: “Got on my dead man’s suit and a smilin’ skull ring/My lucky graveyard boots and a song to sing”; phantasmal electric folk with a ripping harp solo. And about 50 decibels down the scale, ‘Paradise’ carries whispers of ‘The Sound Of Silence’, committing jingoist’s blasphemy by putting itself inside the head of a suicide bomber: “I take the schoolbooks from your pack/Plastics wire and your kiss . . . I hold my breath and close my eyes/And I wait for paradise”.
It doesn’t always come off so good. ‘Worlds Apart’ attempts to tell a GI Joe-meets-local-girl parable over the Islamic devotional airs of Asif Ali Khan and group and just sounds like failed fusion. And in the context of the album entire, the levity of tunes like ‘Let’s Be Friends’ and ‘Mary’s Place’ just doesn’t work. But it does all pull back together for ‘My City Of Ruins’. Baptised at the Telethon concert last September 21, this is a love song made fortuitous by events beyond its span, with Bruce urging, “C’mon rise up” over a framework borrowed from Van and The Band. Here, the healing has begun.
I’ll wager the true nature of the material on The Rising will only become manifest when Bruce takes it on the road this winter – songs have a funny way of rewriting themselves right before the eyes of the beholders. In the meantime, I’ll be dubbing my own revised 50-minute version of this album, and I guarantee I’ll play the shit out of it.
True believers, get in line. The rest of you, catch the live show and make up your own minds.