Bruce Springsteen Forum

Rite of Springsteen
The spirit of the age feels darkened and doomy; time for a Boss revival

John Harris
Friday February 16, 2007
Guardian

It is time, I fear, to temporarily stop playing retro one-upmanship and place all those CDs by Can, Gang of Four and Albert Ayler to one side. Never mind that the man himself is currently coming over all folksome and keeping his classic incarnation at arm's length: 2007 is the year of the long-delayed Bruce Springsteen revival. By the summer - just maybe, anyway - boom-boxes at Glastonbury will be soundtracking warm afternoons with repeat-plays of Darkness on the Edge of Town, while callow students realise that now him from the Kooks has claimed that "It's almost impossible not to be influenced by Nick Drake", it's time to move in exactly the opposite direction, strap your hands across the nearest available engines, and put on Born to Run.
It all goes something like this. The current toast of that slightly rusty-looking 35-plus fella we know these days as 50 Quid Bloke (the amount of cash he will happily spend on a single batch of albums, if you missed that meeting) is a group called the Hold Steady, an assembly of slightly rusty-looking fellas based in Brooklyn. If you're minded to buy their new album Boys and Girls in America, you may soon be luxuriating in a raging mixture of poetry, power chords, and vocals that sound like they were recorded while drunkenly playing pool (red baize, naturally). Its songs, for the most part, are rooted in those moments when American romance turns dysfunctional and dead-ended. And whose influence comes roaring out of just about all of it? Bruce.

Ditto the imminent Arcade Fire album, which a scary review embargo prevents me saying too much about, apart from this: it is frequently as big, boomy, and as Bruce-esque as its subject matter (chiefly, the impact of these doom-laden times on ordinary lives, and the fantasy of escape), and it will likely send anyone who thought the Arcade Fire represented some brave reinvention of the "indie" ethic running back to Belle & Sebastian. Chuck in the Killers' woefully misfiring but undoubtedly Springsteen-influenced Sam's Town, and the evidence starts to look conclusive. And it goes on: in April, as I just read on a website called Brooklyn Vegan, there will an indie-orientated Springsteen tribute concert at that renowned Manhattan institution Carnegie Hall.

So, audience - is this a good or a bad thing? Those of us who cut our teeth in the 1980s will always associate Bruce with such horrors as Courteney Cox's cameo role in the Dancing in the Dark video, and that not-right-at-all synthesizer fanfare that begins Born in the USA - the howl of Nam-related anguish that the kind of suburban dolts who had posters of red Ferraris on their wall mistakenly took as the first stirrings of the same spirit that defined Top Gun (as, if you check the historical record, did Ronald Reagan). But never mind all that: as anyone with half a clue will discover, at its best, his work really does do what Springsteen disciples claim.

I won't pretend to put his records on all that often, but still - on a certain kind of day, when the sky is the same colour as the pavement, nothing beats 1982's Portastudio-suicide album Nebraska. In terms of a head-spinningly evocative meld of rock and soul, there are few songs as effective as, say, Tenth Avenue Freeze Out (1975). And setting aside its icky production, there are times when the phone should be left of the hook, leaving an afternoon to be set aside for the almost crazily varied moods of The River (1980).

But why should Springsteen be bubbling through 2007? The spirit of the age feels darkened and doomy; maybe musicians finally feel that the wind of history ought to be directed through their music, so this is what inevitably happens. They get in the roadworn imagery, glockenspiels and echo chambers, while the rest of us undergo what might be termed The Rite of Springsteen. Ergo the big Bruce renaissance. And look! I got through the last 600-odd words without making reference to "The Boss".

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