New: All Springsteen All The Time!

So I caught Bruce’s show at half-time yesterday and am having a hard time reconciling some of the fawning reviews I’ve read of it online with the performance I witnessed.

Here’s a perfect example; the predictable Rolling Stone rave. However as they seem to be required by law to be wildly supportive of Mr. Springsteen’s work irregardless of actual merit, it wasn’t as surprising as other gushing headlines like this one: Springsteen = Best Super Bowl Halftime Show Ever

Best Ever? Please. That would have to be U2’s incredible, moving performance at the first Super Bowl post-9/11.

The enthusiasm of those non-corporate reviewers without a stake in Springsteen’s ongoing success like Best-Show-Ever Guy is harder to understand besides simple differences in opinion. They seem to be reviewing the show they had hoped to see. I saw a guy who looked like he was trying to work himself up to a heart attack in 12 minutes.

The thing about Springsteen concerts is, they don’t really get good till you’ve gotten past the first blast of the obligatory opening crowd-pleasers. So maybe I was looking for something different. But he cut his songs to shreds, stripped them of what made them arguably great in the first place (its hard to establish musical grandeur in a greatest-hits medley format), and I didn’t think he looked very comfortable attempting it. Additionally, for one whole chopped-up songette (“Born to Run” I seem to recall) it sounded like his monitor had gone out – painful to listen to. He was all over the place except for on top of the melody. He rallied with his third song, the new one – the new songs always sound best because the artist is still invested in them – but again, truncating it and rushing on and off-stage a conspicuously black chorus to sing backup... It reminded me of the old Steve Martin joke about a Vegas lounge act who’s really good, but he’s got it all in in about 15 minutes so the whole set is one incomprehensible blur of bits of song, banter, back-slapping and gambling jokes. It was exactly like that.

For what it’s worth, I would have recommended dropping the first tune, a deep-catalog cut popular with long-time fans, and doing justice to the three that remained. That’s what U2 did — carefully selected a few stadium-worthy songs, played them in their entirety and nailed them. (Here’s the first half of that performance.)

Yesterday’s Springsteen show wasn’t the set to get anybody not already into Bruce to change their minds. The performance on the mall in DC a few days before the inauguration, that was the one that resonated. He had what looked like the same gospel choir behind him and seemed much more the elder statesman of rock that he is than the carnival barker luring yokels into the tent to see the dog-faced boy who played the Super Bowl.

Plus, Paul McCartney, Prince and U2 all showed that playing the Super Bowl could be done with bombast and exhilaration but without looking so obviously like a fish out of water.

So, that’s my specific beef. If I had to say it all in one line — boy won’t you be sorry you didn’t just skip to this line? — it would be: his work was showing.

Now, back to my regularly-scheduled sick leave...