Showing posts with label wrecking ball. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wrecking ball. Show all posts

Friday, October 11, 2013

Springsteen Releases A Poignant Thank You

by Gregg Chadwick




Bruce Springsteen released a beautiful new video as a thank you to fans that sets highlights from the just completed Wrecking Ball tour to a new recording of  “Dream Baby Dream.”

Video edited by Thom Zimny, shot by Chris Hilson. 
Audio produced by Ron Aniello with Bruce Springsteen, mixed by Bob Clearmountain.


Read Bruce's personal thank you to fans:






Friday, November 02, 2012

Springsteen and The E Street Band Close Hurricane Sandy Benefit w/ Land of Hope and Dreams

by Gregg Chadwick

 

NBC broadcast a fundraiser tonight to raise money for hurricane relief for the communities hit hardest by Hurricane Sandy. (If you are on the West Coast the event will be re-broadcast across NBC and its affiliated networks including MSNBC starting at 8pm.)
To donate, visit RedCross.org or iTunes.com/redcross; call 1-800-HELPNOW or 1-800-RED-CROSS; or text "REDCROSS" to 90999 to make a $10 donation.

The telethon, Hurricane Sandy: Coming Together, was hosted by newscaster Matt Lauer and included poignant performances by Staten Island's Christina Aguilera, New Jersey's Jon Bon Jovi, and Long Island's Billy Joel, as well as Steven Tyler with members of Aerosmith, and Sting. 

 Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band closed the event with a powerful rendition of Land and Hope and Dreams from his most recent album Wrecking Ball. Bruce dedicated the song: "We're gonna send this out to the people of NY and NJ, and to all those who put their lives on the line with their service this week. This is Land of Hope and Dreams." Then he and the band tore into a crisp five-and-a-half minute rock n' roll train ride across the desolated Jersey shore. A powerful performance that spoke more of rebuilding and moving on than it did of sadness and reflection.  

If you have not read my piece on this song, which I  wrote in March upon the album's release, I have re-posted it below:


Land of Hope and Dreams
(Song by Song Review of Bruce Springsteen's New Album - Wrecking Ball)

People get ready, there's a train a-comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
Don't need no ticket, you just thank the Lord
-Curtis Mayfield, People Get Ready


Central Railroad of New Jersey Steam 4-6-2, Jersey City, New Jersey, February 06, 1954 


My grandfather on my mother's side spent his working life as a train engineer on the Jersey Central Line. That itself sounds like a Springsteen lyric and explains part of my great love for Land of Hope and Dreams.  Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band first performed the song during the reunion tour in 1999, a live version was released on  Live in New York City in 2001 and also on The Essential Bruce Springsteen in 2003.  



The version of Land of Hope and Dreams featured on Wrecking Ball is the first studio recording of the song and poignantly includes one of the last recorded performances by E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons, who died in June 2011. 

The inclusion of this song at this point in this album is cathartic. Up to now, hope has been yearned for in Wrecking Ball, but fear and doubt have threatened to overwhelm the lives of those living in the songs. 

The album version of the song begins with a soloist from The Victorious Gospel Choir spiritualizing an echo of Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready:

Oh, Oh, Oh, This Train

The full choir joins in with banjo and organ accompaniment:

Don't you want to ride?
This train, this train, this train,
Get onboard, Get onboard, Get onboard

An August Dream

Gregg Chadwick
An August Dream
20"x36" oil on linen 2011

Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready was directly inspired by the Civil Rights March on Washington in August 1963 and Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have A Dream speech which was given from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the event.

By using the metaphor of the train of salvation, Mayfield's inspiring song continues a tradition of American folk music that began with African American Spirituals referencing the Gospel Train and the Underground Railroad that was then continued by Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash.  As Juan Williams writes for NPR:

"The train that is coming in the song speaks to a chance for redemption -- the long-sought chance to rise above racism, to stand apart from despair and any desire for retaliation -- an end to the cycle of pain."

The amazing thing that speaks to the depth of Springsteen's inspiration is that we are only 30 seconds into the studio version of Land of Hope and Dreams and this much history has been evoked. 

I suggest that you put on a pair of headphones and listen to the song with the music up loud because at this point the musical train thunders in with rumbling guitar, drums, mandolin and swirling keyboards. Every time I listen to this moment in Land of Hope and Dreams, I remember a photo of me as a little kid standing next to my grandpa Desch as he guides a Jersey Central steam engine down the tracks. It was in the 1960's, but the photo is in black and white tones that give the image a timeless quality that hovers somewhere between memory and dream. 

Springsteen urges us onboard:

Grab your ticket and your suitcase
Thunder's rolling down this track
You don't know where you're goin' now
But you know you won't be back
Darlin' if you're weary
Lay your head upon my chest
We'll take what we can carry
And we'll leave the rest

Well, Big Wheels roll through fields
Where sunlight streams
Meet me in a land of hope and dreams



JMW Turner
Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway
36"x48" oil on canvas 1844
National Gallery, London


I will provide for you
And I'll stand by your side

I also think of my Dad's parents and the time we took a road trip deep into the South during the Civil Rights era. At a road stop somewhere along I95, in Georgia I think, my Grandma Chadwick saw me staring at a crude racist, epithet scrawled on a sign. She put her arm around me and said to me "Don't mind about those words. Those words aren't true. God loves everyone one of us - equally."
It was one of the first, and one of the best lessons about civil rights and equality that I have ever learned. 

As Springsteen sings:



You'll need a good companion now for
This part of the ride
Leave behind your sorrows
Let this day be the last
Well, Tomorrow there'll be sunshine


And all this darkness past


I think of the more recent past and how much I needed to hear this song when I saw Springsteen and The E Street Band on the Reunion Tour in 1999. I took BART in from San Francisco to Oakland with a copy under my arm of Eric Alterman's recently published, It Ain't No Sin to be Glad You're Alive: The Promise of Bruce SpringsteenOn the train over, I read the epilogue about a new song that Springsteen had written which was the initial live version of Land of Hope and Dreams. A relationship that I had thought was real was ending and I found myself in a place similar to the despair found in Michelle Moore's rap in Springsteen's Rocky Ground. I needed to get on board. That night in Oakland, my faith was rewarded in Land of Hope and Dreams. I was one with the crowd and the band carried us along.



Clarence Clemons and Bruce Springsteen
from the Born to Run cover shoot
June 1975
photo by Eric Meola


The next time I heard the E Street Band play Land of Hope and Dreams, the whole country needed the spirit that Springsteen's music at its best can provide. The Rising, with its call to national unity after the horrors of the September 11 attacks had been released in July 2002 and a month later I stood close to the stage by Clarence Clemons throughout the entire concert in San Jose. I had met Clarence at a private dot com gig in San Francisco a few years before and warmly remembered the giant hug he had given me after the event. In San Jose, during the bands homage to Amadou Diallo - "American Skin", Clarence Clemons' face was streaked with tears as he intoned the refrain "41 shots". The music roared that night. The crowd around knew the words to every song and sang them as if their lives depended on it. And maybe they did? 



That August night in San Jose, the concert ended with a gospel fueled, steel engined, crowd propelling version of Land of Hope and Dreams. Now as I listen to the recorded version, with my headphones on and the music up loud, I can still see Clarence but the tears are mine as I listen to his last sax solo. 

This Train
Dreams will not be thwarted
This Train
Faith will be rewarded
This Train
Hear the steel wheels singin'
This Train
Bells of freedom ringin'

As Clarence Clemon's last recorded solo fades, Springsteen slides into Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready. As the train pulls into the final station, The Victorious Gospel Choir joins in with a musical epitaph for the Big Man.




All lyrics from Land of Hope and Dreams -  Copyright © Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP)

Debris In Belmar, New Jersey After Hurrican Sandy Inscribed With Lyric From Bruce Springsteen's Song Sandy
Photo Courtesy Backstreets Magazine




To donate, visit RedCross.org or iTunes.com/redcross; call 1-800-HELPNOW or 1-800-RED-CROSS; or text "REDCROSS" to 90999 to make a $10 donation.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Friday, April 27, 2012

Something In the Night: Springsteen and the E Street Band at the Los Angeles Sports Arena

by Gregg Chadwick


"This was perhaps the most inspirational show I’ve witnessed in 30 years of attending thousands of concerts, including at least a dozen by Springsteen. There was maybe one better: When he played Jazz Fest in New Orleans after Katrina and turned the city of ruins into a city reborn. But Morello’s lead on “Ghost of Tom Joad” will be forever seared into my conscience as a testimonial, and a hope." 
 - Evelyn McDonnell, The Los Angeles Times 

Last night the skies of Los Angeles cleared. The storms of the past few days receded only to be followed by the fierce weather of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's Wrecking Ball Tour. The sold out Los Angeles Sports Arena sported a new coat of paint but the ghosts of past political and musical triumphs seemed to hang in the air. 





With the house lights up, the band entered the arena with the theme from the film The Magnificent Seven blasting. This 1960 American film, directed by John Sturges, is an old-west epic loosely based on Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's iconic film Seven Samurai. Evoking both aging gunfighters and ronin battling for a cause, the band came ready to rumble, opening the concert with Springsteen's Badlands.


On November 5, 1980 at Arizona State University, the day after Ronald Reagan's  election, Springsteen famously expressed just before the E Street Band launched into a ferocious version of Badlands, "I don't know what you guys think about what happened last night, but I think it's pretty frightening."


Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band 
Badlands
(Live at the Los Angeles Sports Arena -  April 26 2012)

Last night's version opened without comment. But it was clear from the tone of the song and the themes of Springsteen's current album Wrecking Ball that our times are no less frightening. 

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band 
(Live at the Los Angeles Sports Arena -  April 26 2012)
photo by Gregg Chadwick

In the Los Angeles Times, Evelyn McDonnell reminds us that "Springsteen has an unmatched gift for expressing our national pain — and also delivering us from it." Springsteen's song  Badlands evokes this pain and then in a triumphal fist-pounding, arena shaking, musical catharsis propels us to “Keep pushing till it’s understood and these badlands start treating us good.”

By the song's conclusion, many in the raucous audience were hoarse voiced and dripping with sweat. Laidback L.A.? Hell no. 

The next song played, We Take Care of Our Own, has grown richer and more nuanced in the live performances since it was debuted at the Grammy's in Los Angeles the day after Whitney Houston's untimely death. Some of the shared sadness of that day has worked its way into the sometimes ironic lines of the song and the audience last night at the Sports Arena belted the refrain with Springsteen and the E Street Band as if in a bid to exorcise the demons of greed and self-centeredness that have haunted our recent history.

The night was just beginning and Max Weinberg's superb drumming guided the musical evening. Gary Tallent's, at times under recognized, bass joined with Max's drums to provide a thundering pulse to Springsteen's songs of loss and redemption. Phil Gallo in Billboard explains that the Wrecking Ball Tour is the first "E Street outing without the late saxophonist Clarence Clemons and keyboardist Danny Federici. Springsteen has opted to fill the holes created by their absence with an element no one would have believed was absent, a sweet soulfulness and militaristic percussion. Clemons' brawniness and the wails that evoked moments of isolation and desperation are replaced by a horn section that alters songs moods like lighting, blue on one song, fire-engine red on the next."  




Springsteen sang the song Wrecking Ball last night like a weathered boxer urging an exhausted opponent to continue an endless well-matched fight for the love of the sport. The audience ate it up and when Springsteen sang the repeated lines "Hard times come and hard times go" in a poignant howl, the young woman behind me laid her arms around me in an expression of empathy. The sacred moment was shared.  

The call for community continued at the Sports Arena in a passionate version of The Ties That Bind. The song was deeply influenced by the sound of Creedence Clearwater Revival's powerful Who'll Stop the Rain and in context with the Wrecking Ball material, the continual flux of life, death and shared existence embodied in The Ties That Bind proved almost overwhelming: 

You sit and wonder just who's gonna stop the rain
Who'll ease the sadness, who's gonna quiet the pain

 After this early emotional crescendo, the stakes grew higher. How would the powerful, musical and emotional connection of this evening continue? Springsteen countered all bets by bringing out the incredibly talented and passionate musician Tom Morello. Beginning with Death to My Hometown, Morello joined Springsteen on stage for four powerful songs spread throughout the night.  

Morello's searing guitar solo closed Jack of All Trades a few songs later




Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band With Tom Morello
Jack of All Trades
(Live at the Los Angeles Sports Arena -  April 26 2012)

When he wasn't on stage, Morello sat with his family, close to the edge of the stage, and according to nearby concert goers sang along exuberantly with nearly every song.


Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band 
Something In the Night
(Live at the Los Angeles Sports Arena -  April 26 2012)

A key moment of the evening was found in this tours' premier of Something in the Night.
This haunting song is full of an almost existential darkness. The recorded version from Springsteen's 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town contains one of Bruce's most heart wrenching vocal roars. Last night in Los Angeles, Springsteen growled and roared for all of us as he sang:

You're born with nothing,
and better off that way,
Soon as you've got something they send
someone to try and take it away,

As on the Darkness album, the band next crashed into a thundering Candy's Room.  Without missing a beat at Candy's conclusion, Springsteen yelled out to the band,"She's the One." 
Jake Clemons, Clarence Clemons' nephew, blistered the saxophone solos in She's the One and held his sax aloft in triumph at the song's end to roars of affirmation from the crowd.




The LA Weekly asks a question in their review of last night's show:

 "We've been watching Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play in concert for decades, and it seems as if he and his crew get better with every tour. How? With few rare exceptions, aren't rockers supposed to kind of get stale once they get older?


Whether it's today's troubled zeitgeist or solid new material from the album Wrecking Ball or the recent passing of longtime saxophonist Clarence Clemons, Springsteen was inspired and inspiring in a nearly three-hour show, once again making fans at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena true believers in the power of rock 'n' roll."


For me, the continual growth in Springsteen's concerts is his extraordinary ability to push his art to the edge. Sometimes it involves stripping his music down to the barest essence. Other times, as on this current tour in support of Wrecking Ball, Springsteen adds to his sonic arsenal by bringing in a full horn section, backup vocalists and extra percussion to play off of Max Weinberg's bedrock drumming.


 On this tour, Springsteen is also openly embracing the music of his formative years, especially the sweet soul music of Smokey Robinson and the inclusive music of Curtis Mayfield. Each night, Springsteen sings an homage to the soul greats in what has become known as the Apollo Medley. During this stretch, Springsteen ventures deeply into the audience, often - like he did last night at the L.A. Sports Arena -  chugging a borrowed beer. Like a good natured parody of a Superbowl ad, Bruce tipped the beer back letting it spill across his face and down his shirt. Soon after, he was held aloft by the crowd and bodysurfed halfway across the arena to the main stage. Tom Morello met him at the stage with a giant grin and his guitar emblazoned with the words: 
Arm the Homeless. 


Evelyn McDonnell evocatively describes Morello's musicianship:

"Then stroking, beating, hugging and pounding his custom ... guitar, Morello made it a sword, a trumpet, a beat box, a megaphone. It was an ear-shattering, time-stopping performance to which the audience played mesmerized witness. Tom Joad was there, and Clemons, and deceased E Street keyboardist Danny Federici too."

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band With Tom Morello
Ghost of Tom Joad 
(Live at the Los Angeles Sports Arena -  April 26 2012)

Land of Hope and Dreams brought the train into the station  for the encores which ranged from the gospel beauty of Rocky Ground, to the surf guitar of a Ramones inspired cover of California Sun, to Born to Run, to Dancing in the Dark, and finally a celebratory and elegiac Tenth Avenue Freeze-out


Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band  
California Sun
(Live at the Los Angeles Sports Arena -  April 26 2012)



Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (With Pam Springsteen) 
Dancing In the Dark
(Live at the Los Angeles Sports Arena -  April 26 2012)




Bruce Springsteen Is Held Up by the Audience Beneath a Portrait of Clarence Clemons 

(Live in Buffalo -  April 2012)

A Springsteen concert is a shared experience of mourning and communal rebirth. Joan Walsh writes in Salon that,"If there were a church like this, I’d be there every Sunday." Springsteen and the E Street Band play again tonight in Los Angeles and then the Wrecking Ball Tour moves on to New Orleans for the Jazz Fest on Sunday. Joan Walsh encourages us to jump on this train,"If you can see him this Sunday in New Orleans, do it. Experiencing this show in the land of stately above-ground cemeteries and glorious marching-band funerals, as well as Hurricane Katrina and the Superdome, might be the ultimate way to experience this sad, heroic, redemptive tour."

Setlist:


Badlands
We Take Care of Our Own
Wrecking Ball
The Ties That Bind
Death to My Hometown (with Tom Morello)
My City of Ruins
The E Street Shuffle 
Jack of All Trades (with Tom Morello)
Something in the Night
Candy's Room
She's the One
Easy Money 
Waitin' on a Sunny Day
The Promised Land
Apollo Medley
The Ghost of Tom Joad (with Tom Morello) 
The Rising
Lonesome Day 
We Are Alive
Land of Hope and Dreams
* * *
Rocky Ground (with Michelle Moore)
California Sun
Born to Run
Dancing in the Dark
Tenth Avenue Freeze-out (with Tom Morello)





Song by Song Reviews of Wrecking Ball on Speed of Life:



More at:

"Bruce Springsteen's widescreen vision of America on Wrecking Ball is filled with terror, tension, tenacity and above all else, triumph which may not replenish your bank account, but it will replenish your soul."
-Anthony Kuzminski, Bruce Springsteen - Wrecking Ball, antiMusic
All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly
The Working Man's Voice - The Wall Street Journal
Onstage and Backstage with Springsteen at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
Parsing the Samples and Quotes on Wrecking Ball
Bruce Springsteen, Théatre Marigny press conferenceParis, February 2012