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Bericht aus der New york Times
As he and the E Street Band kick off a world tour, the troubadour for troubled times reflects on where he's been and where he's headed.
By Geoff Boucher reporting from asbury park, n. j. > > >
April 5, 2009
"There are a lot of ghosts in this place," Bruce Springsteen said as his boots clomped on an ancient staircase at the Asbury Park Convention Hall. It was here in this old seaside venue that Springsteen, as a teenager, watched Jim Morrison prowl the stage and Keith Moon thunder away on drums for the Who. It was also in the corridors here that he brushed past a wild-child named Janis Joplin. "Our elbows, they came this close," said Springsteen, somehow still amazed that a Jersey kid could come within arm's reach of rock history. ¶ Unlike those lost icons, Springsteen was built for the long haul. He will turn 60 in September, and he'll do so while on the road with the E Street Band supporting their latest album, "Working on a Dream." The world tour (which comes to the Los Angeles Sports Arena on April 15 and 16) officially began Wednesday in San Jose, but it was in late March, here at this creaky boardwalk venue, that Springsteen began working on "the conversation" of the concert tour, as he calls it, trying out the new songs in front of a live audience for the first time. ¶ On a blustery Monday afternoon, just hours before the first of two charity shows, Springsteen arrived at the venue with a 155-year-old surprise for his bandmates. During sound check he told the singers in the group to line up along the lip of the stage and, looking down at the lyrics, Springsteen coached them through a late addition to their opening-night lineup, a Civil War-era lament by Stephen Foster called "Hard Times Come Again No More":
It's a song that the wind blows across the troubled wave
It's a cry that is heard along the shore.
It's the words that are whispered beside the lowly grave
When hard times will come again no more.
It's a song and a sigh of the weary.
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.Afterward, Springsteen leaned against a pockmarked wall and plucked at his Telecaster with a distracted look on his face. "We're sort of in search of the show," he said. "I've got half a thing planned in my head . . . mainly we're getting the new songs down and then finding the things that are in tune with the times and what's going on out there right now. But, you know, we are a band built for hard times."
Still, nothing comes easy these days for the E Street Band. The band prides itself on work ethic, but the struggles are different now. Two members are coming off of major surgery and then there's the hardscrabble nature of the music business these days. Album sales (494,000 copies in the U.S.) are good, not great, and the tour hasn't stirred the same sort of mad scramble as the old days. There are 3 1/2 decades in the band's rear-view mirror too, but Springsteen has his eye on the road ahead.
"The live show is a current event at all times," said Springsteen,who, more than any other performer, has figured out how to be Woody Guthrie and Elvis Presley at the same time. In January, he serenaded a new president by singing "The Rising," his wrenching Sept. 11 spiritual, with a red-robed choir at the Lincoln Memorial; a few weeks later it was Springsteen the showman, belting out a 12-minute medley with "Glory Days" and "Born to Run" between the fireworks and cheerleaders of the Super Bowl halftime show. "There were some requests for 'The Ghost of Tom Joad,' " Springsteen deadpanned when asked about his jukebox duty at the ballgame, "but we decided to save that one for a different day."
The inaugural event was a natural for a man who, as he puts it, has "been involved in national conversation" for a long time, but the Super Bowl appearance came with the risk of crassness. Springsteen said he took the booking because of his confidence in halftime producer Don Mischer (who also handled the inauguration concert), but there was another pragmatic motivation as well.
"I've said no for about 10 years or however long they've been asking, but, I tell you, we played on the last tour and there were some empty seats here and there and, well, there shouldn't be any empty seats at an E Street Band show. I hold pride that we remain one of the great wonders of the world . . . so sometimes you got to remind people a little bit."
For the singer, it's not enough to be an essential artist, he also wants to be urgent. He mocked the idea of "heritage" or "legacy" acts, the concert-industry jargon for aging bands that tour with just the old hits. "Resting on their laurels, resting on their . . . legacy," he said with a wicked grin. " 'Hey, I'm sitting on my legacy! Ow, my legacy's killing me!' "
The forever-young Springsteen seemed to be pulsing with new reasons to believe after watching the election of Barack Obama.
"You felt like the country that you had been imagining in your work, the kind of place you want your kids to grow up in, on that election night it showed its face," he said. "I never knew if I would see its face. I always wondered if maybe I was just a link in the chain pulling toward that place. But to catch a glimpse of it, just a glimpse . . . so it's real right now. I didn't know we had it in us, to tell you truth. The next day all my music was a little truer than the day before. That was big for me."
Springsteen is driven, competitive and, whether it's on stage or at the gym, obsessed with a muscular expression of himself as some sort of populist-poet-as-athlete, a concept that may be as peculiar to America as, well, the practice of bringing guitars and fighter planes to a football game.
The singer wants to be a force of good but also amplify his music by reaching the biggest audience possible. That puts him in awkward spots. Last year, he signed a sweetheart deal with Wal-Mart for an exclusive CD but then publicly apologized for it after critics said he betrayed his role as a workers rights champion ("I dropped the ball," he told the New York Times). In February, Springsteen was in the news again, lashing out at Ticketmaster for acting suspiciously like the nation's largest scalper with tickets for the new tour. By March, the rock icon was ready for a laugh but instead found himself squirming in discomfort on " The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" as the typically smooth host devolved on-air into a babbling Boss fan.
In person, Springsteen seems oddly shy and has a truly goofy laugh. He is intense when it comes to quality control, but his band's rehearsals are peppered with old-pal razzing. But there's no doubt that Springsteen is an earnest man in an ironic age, a vinyl-era rock evangelist at a time when music fans are losing that religion -- or at the very least, setting their denomination on shuffle. Then there's the fact that Springsteen is a tycoon singing protest songs during economic calamity. He's well aware of the tugs; he even sang about in 1992's "Better Days": "It's a sad funny ending to find yourself pretending / a rich man in a poor man's shirt."
For Springsteen, though, the mission becomes clear when he is on tour.
Quelle:http://www.latimes.com/entertainment
Bruce Springsteen, photographed at the Convention Hall in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
Magie
