. For the inaugural issue of Rolling Stone, in 1967, he panned Jimi Hendrix’s classic “Are You Experienced?” The next year, he walloped Cream for the loose bombast of their live shows, adding that Eric Clapton, the band’s lead guitarist, was a “master of the blues clichés of all the post-World War II blues guitarists . ‘A Change Is Gonna Come.’ Math?

“I probably worked harder than anybody else I saw,” he said.

The drummer who made it for the long haul, Max Weinberg, owns houses in the New Jersey countryside and Tuscany. You shouldn’t be able to catch your breath. For the next hour and a half, the band plays through a set that alternates tales of economic pain with party-time escape. “You’re setting out your themes. The conditions were abysmal, as they often are for opening acts: the houselights were up, the crowd was alternately inattentive and hostile. Bruce Springsteen, who sat down with New Yorker editor David Remnick at New York City's Town Hall for an event that sold out in "six seconds," made a … It will be released on Oct. 23. “To me, Clarence is still on that stage, and I don’t want to step on his toes.”, Springsteen with Clarence Clemons, his longtime saxophonist and onstage foil, in 1984. (“Richie Sambora, Thanks for making our lives better.” Doubtful.) Sometimes the band slept in the van. “The band is a little community up there,” Springsteen said, “and it gathers together, and we try to heal the parts that God broke and honor the parts that are no longer with us.”. “Hola, Catalunya!” ♦. (The crutch is hardly unique—Sinatra, in late career, used a TelePrompter, and so do the Stones and many other bands.)

Clemons was a colossus—six-four, a former football player.

Onstage, he held real life at bay.

Asbury Park became Springsteen’s Liverpool, his Tupelo, his Hibbing. there!”. . He leads a band like he has been doing it forever. Your support is vital to helping us provide free local news. He drove from the East Coast to California and then drove straight back. Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Landau loved the well-wrought single, whether by the Beatles or Sam and Dave; he was suspicious of arty self-indulgence. At the Bottom Line, Springsteen became himself.

He sang of AIDS (“Streets of Philadelphia”), dislocation (“The Ghost of Tom Joad”), abandonment (“Spare Parts”), and Iraq (“Last to Die”).

We've sent an email with instructions to create a new password. (The answer is that they don’t: after a month, “Wrecking Ball” dropped to No. He was also fiery in his style of labor unrest. He recognized in Springsteen a drive to create original work. Springsteen is no longer in the Beatlemania phase of the mid-eighties—a period of mini-riots around his hotels—but he is still able to sell out stadiums on the I-95 corridor and other cities in the United States. And now, the day before the first concert in Barcelona, Mary Van Zandt, Steve’s mother, died, in Red Bank. But I was thinking that maybe we should give that a rest tonight.’ ”, Springsteen smiled and said, “Well, yeah.

The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. “We talked for hours,” Landau said. He had not made the connection between his father’s drift and the politics of unemployment, the depression of Freehold and the wave of deindustrialization. Springsteen is joined on “Letter To You” by Roy Bittan, Nils Lofgren, Patti Scialfa, Garry Tallent, Stevie Van Zandt, Max Weinberg, Charlie Giordano and Jake Clemons. It’d be like finding out now that the Stones covered Chuck Berry!”. “Wrecking Ball” is the No. “Letter To You” will have nine new songs and include new recordings of three unreleased songs that predate Springsteen’s 1973 debut album, “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.” The songs are: “Janey Needs a Shooter,” “If I Was the Priest” and “Song for Orphans.”. To revisit this article, select My⁠ ⁠Account, then View saved stories. It’s in relative check as far as people who do what I do. Springsteen’s admiration for Clemons was real, and so was his understanding of the racial fear and prejudice in New Jersey—as his 2016 memoir, “Born to Run,” makes clear. It will be released on Oct. 23. My life took a very different course, but my life is an anomaly. After one of his last concerts, he told a friend, “I deserve a God-damned Academy Award.” He said that he felt like Mickey Rourke’s character in “The Wrestler”; he was portraying a powerful figure onstage even as he was falling apart physically. I’m whispering in your ear, and you’re dreaming my dreams, and then I’m getting a feeling for yours.

Coldplay thickens its sound with heaps of pre-taped instruments and synthesizers.

We drove past the low-slung building that used to house the surfboard factory where Lopez lived with Springsteen. But that capital diminishes the more often you do it. He called it the Bruce Springsteen Band. There’s a big TV, an espresso machine, and a framed walking stick that Presley once owned and, in 1973, shattered in a fit of pique. As Springsteen grew more worldly, he became far more political. I was a big John Cheever fan, and so when I got into Chekhov I could see where Cheever was coming from. He wants his audience to leave the arena, as he commands them, “with your hands hurting, your feet hurting, your back hurting, your voice sore, and your sexual organs stimulated!”, So the display of exuberance is critical. Springsteen knew he had run out of things to say about desperate nights on the Turnpike; he wanted to write songs he could sing as an adult, about marriage, about being a father, and about larger social issues. Scialfa has recorded three albums of her own. It will be released on Oct. 23. Springsteen had performed for officers’ children at the Fort Monmouth “teen club” (dancing, no liquor) with the Castiles, forty-seven years earlier. . The band keeps vamping. That’s what we’re about right now, the communication between the living and the gone. Somehow, Appel did manage to get an appointment with John Hammond.

I can remember when he worked down there, he used to always come home real pissed off, drunk, sit in the kitchen. . On May 2, 1972, Springsteen travelled to the city by bus, carrying a borrowed acoustic guitar with no case. Scialfa’s father was a real-estate developer, and she had studied music at N.Y.U.

Find out what's happening in your community and submit your own local events. For years before I saw this production—it’s a substantial one, about two hours, without intermission—I dragged my heels when it came to appreciating Springsteen’s gifts.

He did not start out that way. .

To revisit this article, select My⁠ ⁠Account, then View saved stories. The audience would know the songs, not to mention the history of the band, much more intimately than he did. Tours grew to corporate scale: private jets, five-star hotels, elaborate catering, massage therapists, efficient management. B. NEW YORK — Bruce Springsteen will release a new rock album that he recorded in his New Jersey home studio with the E Street Band. Springsteen quickly introduces the E Street horns and the singing collective. There are absences that are hanging there. “Standing next to Clarence was like standing next to the baddest ass on the planet,” Springsteen said of him in tribute. They are salaried musicians; in 1989, they were fired en masse. Now they are more likely to take a trip with the kids or cruise the Mediterranean on David Geffen’s yacht. Chicago was about as far from the Dylan aesthetic as you could get. The crew passes out flutes of champagne and plates of cake to celebrate the news about “Wrecking Ball.”, “That never gets old,” Springsteen says, before heading off to join the party. "Letter To You" is Springsteen’s first time performing with the E Street Band since The River 2016 tour. At a rock show? Subscribe to our newsletter for a weekly roundup of the latest. After Appel had paid expenses and taken his considerable cut, the pay was next to nothing. Montréal, Quebec. As Springsteen, who was raised Catholic, sang, it became clear that his commitment to his subject matter was a kind of sermon—one that he had written in order to understand not only himself but what goes into the making of a self. You have to be satisfied with that. That’s your thing. “It’s just a tremendous high. When Springsteen was touring behind the “Born to Run” album, in the mid-seventies, he would stand at the lip of the stage in a spotlight, vamping on a chord, and tell the story of growing up in a dingy two-family house next to a gas station in a working-class section of Freehold known as Texas, because it was first populated by hillbilly migrants from the South. . “So when you are working with him, no matter what the issue is, the first question is, What’s the best thing for Bruce?” Springsteen, he went on, “is the smartest person I’ve ever known—not the most informed or the most educated—but the smartest. Its members were from Freehold, an industrial town half an hour inland from the boardwalk carnies and the sea. In the sixties and seventies, there were dozens of bands that played in the bars along the boardwalk. From the stage, he began to deliver paeans to his causes and ask for donations to local food banks, but the language was never threatening or alienating, and the gate receipts and record sales were beyond fabulous. “I’m, like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ And he’s, like, ‘Well, what do you mean, it’s the truth. Also, someone had dropped an amplifier on his foot at a gig a couple of nights before. From the stage, he said, “Well, the President was mentioning my name in his speech the other day, and I kind of got to wondering what his favorite album of mine must’ve been, you know? (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File), {* backButton *} The Springsteen Lopez describes was a young man of uncommon ambition who was also prone to bouts of withdrawal. Clemons gave Springsteen a mythic companion who embodied the fraternal spirit of the band. (The event sold out in six seconds.) The band’s mascot is Tippy the Banana. Brando would not have acted.

But, historically, at least, I was in the E Street Band. It will be released on Oct. 23.