Record Reviews

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Lloyd Spiegel Double Live Set
Split Enz Spellbound <P>Spellbound is an Australian-only two-disc collection which offers 39 of the band's biggest hits and best-known favorites. There are no shortage of Enz collections on the market, and this is the best to date. All of the tracks have been remastered, and as an incentive to collectors, the rare Luton version of "Semi-Detached" and a drastically remixed version of "Stuff and Nonsense" have been added. The one major flaw is the non-chronological sequencing, which, for a band with two distinct phases and a clear career arc, misses the opportunity to tell the band's story completely. Minor complaints aside, Spellbound is a good starting point for those who want more than any of the single-disc collections have to offer. [In typical Enz fashion, Spellbound was released in several different-colored covers.]</P>— <B>Chris Woodstra</B>
Spooky Tooth Spooky Two
Bruce Springsteen Born To Run <p>Bruce Springsteen's make-or-break third album represented a sonic leap from his first two, which had been made for modest sums at a suburban studio; Born to Run was cut on a superstar budget, mostly at the Record Plant in New York. Springsteen's backup band had changed, with his two virtuoso players, keyboardist David Sancious and drummer Vini Lopez, replaced by the professional but less flashy Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg. The result was a full, highly produced sound that contained elements of Phil Spector's melodramatic work of the 1960s. Layers of guitar, layers of echo on the vocals, lots of keyboards, thunderous drums -- Born to Run had a big sound, and Springsteen wrote big songs to match it. The overall theme of the album was similar to that of The E Street Shuffle; Springsteen was describing, and saying farewell to, a romanticized teenage street life. But where he had been affectionate, even humorous before, he was becoming increasingly bitter. If Springsteen had celebrated his dead-end kids on his first album and viewed them nostalgically on his second, on his third he seemed to despise their failure, perhaps because he was beginning to fear he was trapped himself. Nevertheless, he now felt removed, composing an updated West Side Story with spectacular music that owed more to Bernstein than to Berry. To call Born to Run overblown is to miss the point; Springsteen's precise intention is to blow things up, both in the sense of expanding them to gargantuan size and of exploding them. If The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle was an accidental miracle, Born to Run was an intentional masterpiece. It declared its own greatness with songs and a sound that lived up to Springsteen's promise, and though some thought it took itself too seriously, many found that exalting.</p><p>&mdash; <strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p>
Bruce Springsteen Hammersmith Odeon, London '75 <p>Hammersmith Odeon, London '75 is the disc for those fans who didn't want to pony up the big money for the 30th anniversary edition of Born to Run and its two DVDs. This is the soundtrack for one of them, the Hammersmith Odeon concert, from beginning to end captured in vibrant sound. This show has been revered by tape traders and bootleggers for decades and never has it been presented better, thanks to Bob Clearmountain's fantastic mix. What makes this show so historically important is that it was the first time the band was able to travel overseas to play. (They were barred from doing so in the United States because of a legal battle with Springsteen's former manager.) In any case, well in advance of the gig the notorious British music weeklies began to create a pick-and-pan hype to build and topple a potential new rock messiah as they did all the time. Or, as Springsteen in his liner notes writes, "...this week's Next...Big...Thing." The band was terrified yet geeked to play the hallowed hall. These guys were scared; it fueled the gig, and they pulled it off in spades. They have everything to prove, and plenty to stare down. (Hell, the media hype almost made them the standard-bearers for the entire history of American rock, whether they wanted to be or not — and they may not have believed it themselves, but they played like they felt the responsibility for it, overtly referencing Sam Cooke, Isaac Hayes, and even Boyce & Hart by including pieces of their tunes in Springsteen originals, showing where it all came from. And then, by using a portion of Celtic soulman Van Morrison's "Moondance" — who was taking his own bit from David "Fathead" Newman's read of his former boss Ray Charles — in "Kitty's Back," they reveal clearly that the Beatles, the Stones, and the Who were nowhere to be found on this night.) Most of all, the E Street Band had the quivering guts and naïveté to pull it off. These guys play their asses off; it's as if tomorrow they'll die, so what the hell. The tape proves this show to be adrenaline-filled and fear-drenched. This is a mind-blowing gig. It was filmed for preservation and forgotten about until being resurrected by Springsteen.</p><p>The highlights? Hell, everything here. It begins with a tenderly desperate, under-orchestrated "Thunder Road," sprints head on into a burning "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" before whispering into a free jazz intro to a dramatic, swaggering "Spirit in the Night" that oozes street-smart Jersey soul. And the train never stops; it only slows a bit for moments at a time. And it's not for the band to catch its breath; it's for the crowd, whether it's the frighteningly intense "Lost in the Flood," the shuffling country roots rock that introduces the rollicking "She's the One," or the swaggering anthem of "Born to Run," which only take listeners through a little over half of the first disc! They had the audience after "Spirit," but they were into something deeper, wilder — check the spit and vinegar in "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City" — so they kept pushing harder. This was a young band that musically was as good as anybody on that night. They were rehearsed, confident, and armed with a collection of songs that virtually any musician worth his or her salt would kill to have written even one of. Disc two offers no letdown. There's arguably the single most intense read of "Jungleland" on tape, and a riotously joyful version of "Rosalita" to counter the theater of darkness just visited upon the crowd in the previous song. This version of "Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" is pure street urchin romance taken to the nth level. The E Streeters' read of the "Detroit Medley" is an homage to Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, whose scorching takes on Little Richard's "Jenny Take a Ride," "Devil with a Blue Dress," and "Good Golly Miss Molly" offer spiritual inspiration. They stay on full stun with "For You" and cap it all with "Quarter to Three," leaving the crowd to fall back into the night, wondering if they could believe what they'd just witnessed. Springsteen himself says the night was a blur to him and he never looked back for 30 years at the film or even listened to the show. While the soundtrack is only half the experience of the Hammersmith Odeon 1975 document, it's a worthy half and a necessary set to add to any Springsteen live shelf.</p> <p>&mdash; <b>Thom Jurek</b></p>
Bruce Springsteen Born To Run Box Set <p>There is such a strange feeling to be writing this, listening intently to the remastered version of Bruce Springsteen's breakthrough 1975 recording Born to Run, as if it hadn't happened at all but was happening in this moment. To look back at pop history as something of an oracle through the glass on its reverse side is always tricky. There was a lot at stake in rock & roll in those days. David Bowie was about to move into his next incarnation after the death of Ziggy Stardust and into his Berlin period; Queen was moving away from hard rock and into its own identity as well; Roxy Music was about to crack it; the J. Geils Band was shattering houses everywhere with its brand of roots blues and barroom rock; T. Rex was almost absent on American shores, and Kiss had stepped in mightily and faultily to cash in on it all. Meanwhile, the Faces were history, and the New York Dolls were disintegrating; Aerosmith were fighting each other, Led Zep were the power and glory of hard rock; Iggy was lost to addiction; Marvin Gaye and Motown were turning into something else, as was the Philly soul sound, mutating into the next phase of funk, and eventually disco. P-Funk were tearing it up musically and on the road, but not to many white audiences; Marvin Gaye was working on I Want You; Leroy Hutson was releasing the best albums of his career but to little notice of rock audiences; Miles was in retirement, and only Grover Washington was carrying the soul-jazz banner into the future with Mister Magic and Feels So Good. The Rolling Stones were doing their thing, but they were the Rolling Stones. And then the dread Yes and Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake & Palmer were ruining rock for another five years. The time was right for something to happen, and happen it did. Springsteen and his E Street Band, armed with a slew of session players, came ambling out of the New Jersey shadows, having no idea what they were doing with a brand of guttersnipe, gritty rock infused with soul, R&B, garage band aesthetics, and a stage show that challenged even Mott the Hoople's, to conquer the world whether they wanted to or not.</p><p>In its present incarnation, finally remastered to full satisfaction of fans in the post-LP era, Born to Run sounds as startling, dynamic, and desperate as it did in 1975. The songs roar once more with all the drama of the young, where everything is at stake. Back porches, ramshackle motorcycles, the hidden intimacy of back streets, the violent danger of street gangs vying for turf, and the story of their life and death struggles told and retold with apocryphal detail from a group of observers to those who would retell and embellish them. There's the boredom of summer days and working nine to five just to break out into who knows what, and that desire -- the one that covers everything -- the one that knows that just beyond the confines of front yards and downtowns lies America, and some dream that would materialize if only one had the courage to run toward it. Springsteen's voice is full, raging, howling, crooning, and above all simply full of the magic of his own words as given life by a band who knows nothing except for putting it all on the line. In its present incarnation Born to Run once again proves its place among the greatest rock & roll albums ever recorded. This is it -- life, death, love, betrayal, and the dynamics of big-screen portrayals of the mysteries of everyday -- ordinary life boiled down to an explosive essence that carries within it everything rock & roll ever promised.</p><p>The bonus DVDs are something to behold as well. The Hammersmith Odeon concert from the tour that's included here has a set list to die for. It's adrenaline-filled and fear-drenched. These guys were scared and it fueled the gig. There's everything to prove, and the E Street Band had the quavering guts and naïveté to pull it off. These guys play their asses off; it's as if tomorrow they'll die so what the hell -- and given that the bile Brit music tabloids had the proven potential for, it was entirely possible, as Springsteen explains in his liner notes. The track list is simply incredible, from the cuts to the album at hand to those coming from Greetings from Asbury Park -- "Lost in the Flood," "Hard to Be a Saint in the City," "For You," -- to those from The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle -- "Fourth of July Asbury Park (Sandy)," "Kitty's Back," "Rosalita." And as if this weren't enough, there is the classic "Detroit Medley" and "Quarter to Three." This is a mind-blowing gig, filmed for preservation and forgotten about, until it was recently resurrected from Springsteen's own archives and mixed for this presentation by Bob Clearmountain.</p><p>As if all this weren't enough, there is another disc , Wings for Wheels, a kind of hodgepodge documentary on the making of the album with rare film footage from between 1973 and '75, concert footage, and the intimacy of the studio as this band struggled to keep their deal with the label -- they were on the verge of being booted into eternal obscurity as has-beens who couldn't deliver the big one. The fascination as Springsteen edits and works with Jon Landau to build the crazy, roaring Wall of Sound that became the single "Born to Run" is almost harrowing to watch -- not just as history, but as a gamble that paid off. This is as close to a fan's dream come true as it's going to get. But more than that, the package is the one that proves the reason for Springsteen's longevity. His faith and doubt, his willingness to go the distance, and his belief in the music itself as the conveyor of something bigger than himself to get the poetry across is awe-inspiring. Presented in this way, Born to Run is enough to make one accept that rock & roll is a force to be reckoned with rather than something to market cars, beer, and lingerie; it contains the mythic power of the ages, and dare it be said the proof that God himself can speak through a sleazy looking, beat, flesh and blood batch of street urchins using the ordinary as a means of speaking of the power, vulnerability, romance, and redemption of everyday life as something to be celebrated, struggled through, and cherished.</p><p>&mdash; <strong>Thom Jurek</strong></p><hr/><p>Try to picture the rock scene in 1974, when Bruce Springsteen started writing and recording the album that would thrust him into the national consciousness. Elvis had hit merely 18 years prior; Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles had died or called it quits only three or four years earlier. Bob Dylan had been at it for a while and potentially seemed dated, though he was still only 33. The weight of pop music history was something that could be shrugged off, and with so much unexplored territory, bands felt an obligation to see where rock music might yet go.</p><p>In this environment Springsteen was just 24, still a kid; he'd been hailed as the New Dylan and had recorded two quirky albums but he wasn't a star. He had talent and ambition in equal measure but the thing that would put him over was his vision. Springsteen believed like no one else in the power and possibility of rock, which led him to places that seem strange and maybe even awkward to those who grew up with MTV and everything punk came to symbolize. His naïve but inspiring outlook found its purist expression in Born to Run, which Columbia has now reissued in a deluxe 30th Anniversary Edition packaged with two feature films&mdash;one documentary and one concert&mdash;on DVD.</p><p>Born to Run is a distinctive record, even in the Springsteen canon. Its world is one of impossibly romantic hyperrealism, where the mundane easily becomes fantastic, and it all happens line by line. Picture the depressed state of the Jersey Shore in the early 70s, the dull sense of an era gone, and then check Springsteen's description in the title track: "The amusement park rises bold and stark and kids are huddled on the beach in the mist." This could have been a couple of bored teenagers sitting on a bench bullshitting, but with Springsteen's imagery, some glockenspiel, and a deep sax drone, it's transformed into filmic splendor. The next phrase ups the ante: "I want to die with you, Wendy, on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss." From one angle it's the kind of line that can make you wince, at best a silly emo cliché. The way Springsteen sang it in 1974, it wasn't a dorky diary confessional; it was unhinged expressionism, Kerouac with a bottle of red wine in his stomach. While everyone was zoning out in front of the TV this scruffy dude saw an opera out on the turnpike and a ballet being fought in the alley.</p><p>He wants to know if love is wild and real, he says, but reality isn't a particularly useful concept in the context of this record. A masterpiece Born to Run may be, but only on its own terms. Springsteen at this point didn't know much about women or relationships ("She's the One" is powerful and catchy but fails as a portrait of an actual person) but he had an instinct for drama, and his stories focus on plot and circumstance rather than character. Nearly every song touches on the central mythical image of the rock'n'roll era, the ideas of escape and abandon. The protagonist in "Thunder Road" thinks everything will change if he can make it out of town. The workers in "Night" suppress their daily rage by disappearing into a dark theater of sex after the whistle blows. Conflicts are all man vs. environment and man vs. society; Springsteen would get around to man vs. himself later, after he'd settled down and lived a little more.</p><p>The size extends to the sound, greatly improved on this reissue with the first wholesale remastering since it was first released on CD. Phil Spector was a well-known obsession of Springsteen's at the time, a logical complement to the room-sized thematic canvas he'd stretched. "Jungleland" and "Backstreets" are famously epic, but shorter songs like "Thunder Road" and "She's the One" seem constructed as mini-suites, with tinkly intros building to immense climaxes. The title track was Springsteen's "Good Vibrations", toiled over endlessly in the studio and smothered with endless layers of god knows what before finally being abandoned, flawed and perfect, to the loving arms of radio. His voice would never sound quite this strong again&mdash;perhaps he never pushed it as hard&mdash;and the slap-echo trailing a split second behind adds to the effect.</p><p>The first DVD, a complete 1975 show from the Hammersmith Odeon, is a major find. For someone like me who never got over the disappointment of only one song from 1975 on the Live 1975-85 box, this film is a revelation. The opening piano and harmonica version of "Thunder Road" is the scene setter, with a dim spotlight on Springsteen alone on a darkened stage and Roy Bittan playing somewhere behind. When the rest of the band joins him they have a ball, with a performance in turns earnest, theatrical, melodramatic, and clowning. It's an absolutely essential item in the Springsteen discography.</p><p>Wings for Wheels, the VH-1-ish documentary on the making of the record, is a third too long and will be of only marginal interest for anyone other than committed fans, but there's still something important here. If you can get past the repetitive and fawning testimonials from the band, producers, manager, etc., there's a wealth of information about the technical process of the album, with demonstrations of how songs evolved over time. Hearing the various parts of the dense "Born to Run" picked apart, for example, just the acoustic guitar or saxophone isolated, is like a mini course on how songs are mixed.</p><p>There's also Springsteen's own commentary on the songs&mdash;what they mean and how he wrote them&mdash;which is interesting if not always consistent with how I hear the record. When he says toward the end of the film that Born to Run was "the album where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom&mdash;it was the dividing line," it seems to me he's exactly wrong. A dividing line may be visible, but Born to Run lies entirely on the dreamy and reckless side of maturity and is all the better for it. Every young person should be so lucky, to have a time in his or her life when the inflated romanticism of Born to Run makes perfect sense.</p><p>&mdash; <strong>Mark Richardson, Pitchfork</strong></p>
Bruce Springsteen Darkness On The Edge Of Town <p>Coming three years, and one extended court battle, after the commercial breakthrough of Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town was highly anticipated. Some attributed the album's embattled tone to Springsteen's legal troubles, but it carried on from Born to Run, in which Springsteen had first begun to view his colorful cast of characters as "losers." On Darkness, he began to see them as the working class. One song was called "Factory," and in another, "Badlands," "you" work "'neath the wheel / Till you get your facts learned." Those "facts" are that "Poor man wanna be rich / Rich man wanna be king / And a king ain't satisfied / Till he rules everything." But Springsteen's characters, some of whom he inhabited and sang for in the first person, had little and were in danger of losing even that. Their only hope for redemption lay in working harder -- "You gotta live it everyday," he sang in "Badlands," but you also, as another song noted, have to "Prove It All Night." And their only escape lay in driving. Springsteen presented these hard truths in hard rock settings, the tracks paced by powerful drumming and searing guitar solos. Though not as heavily produced as Born to Run, Darkness was given a full-bodied sound, with prominent keyboards and double-tracked vocals. Springsteen's stories were becoming less heroic, but his musical style remained grand. Yet the sound, and the conviction in his singing, added weight to songs like "Racing in the Street" and the title track, transforming the pathetic into the tragic. But despite the rock & roll fervor, Darkness was no easy listen, and it served notice that Springsteen was already willing to risk his popularity for his principles. Indeed, Darkness was not as big a seller as Born to Run. And it presaged even starker efforts, such as Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad.</p><p>&mdash; <strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p>
Bruce Springsteen Live, Volume 1
Bruce Springsteen The River <p>Imbedded within the double-disc running time of The River is a single-disc album that follows up on the themes and sound of <i>Darkness on the Edge of Town</i> -- wide-screen, mid-tempo rock and stories of the disillusionment of working-class life and the conflicts within families. In these songs, which include the title track, "Independence Day," and "Point Blank," Bruce Springsteen's world view is just as dire as it had become on Darkness, but less judgmental. "Independence Day," for example, is a father-and-son ballad that has little of the anger of its hard rock counterpart on Darkness, "Adam Raised a Cain." Springsteen's heroes again seek to overcome their crushing troubles through defiance and by driving around, and though "The River" repeats the soured love theme of "Racing in the Street," he also posits romance as a possible escape, sometimes combining it with one of the other solutions, as on the eight-plus-minute "Drive All Night." But there is also another album lurking within The River, and it is a more lighthearted pop/rock collection of short, sometimes humorous songs like "Sherry Darling" and "I'm a Rocker." At times Springsteen combines elements of the two, as on "Out in the Street," perhaps the album's quintessential song, a catchy, up-tempo number that sounds like something from the early '60s and echoes the theme of the Vogues' 1966 hit "Five O' Clock World." "Hungry Heart," which became Springsteen's first Top Ten hit, combines a rollicking musical track with a more sober lyrical theme that emphasizes longing over disappointment. But a better guide to Springsteen's development are the songs "Stolen Car" and the album-closing "Wreck on the Highway," gentle, moody ballads imbued with a sense of hopelessness that anticipate his next record, <i>Nebraska</i>.</p>&mdash; <b>William Ruhlmann</b>
Bruce Springsteen The River <p>Imbedded within the double-disc running time of The River is a single-disc album that follows up on the themes and sound of <i>Darkness on the Edge of Town</i> -- wide-screen, mid-tempo rock and stories of the disillusionment of working-class life and the conflicts within families. In these songs, which include the title track, "Independence Day," and "Point Blank," Bruce Springsteen's world view is just as dire as it had become on Darkness, but less judgmental. "Independence Day," for example, is a father-and-son ballad that has little of the anger of its hard rock counterpart on Darkness, "Adam Raised a Cain." Springsteen's heroes again seek to overcome their crushing troubles through defiance and by driving around, and though "The River" repeats the soured love theme of "Racing in the Street," he also posits romance as a possible escape, sometimes combining it with one of the other solutions, as on the eight-plus-minute "Drive All Night." But there is also another album lurking within The River, and it is a more lighthearted pop/rock collection of short, sometimes humorous songs like "Sherry Darling" and "I'm a Rocker." At times Springsteen combines elements of the two, as on "Out in the Street," perhaps the album's quintessential song, a catchy, up-tempo number that sounds like something from the early '60s and echoes the theme of the Vogues' 1966 hit "Five O' Clock World." "Hungry Heart," which became Springsteen's first Top Ten hit, combines a rollicking musical track with a more sober lyrical theme that emphasizes longing over disappointment. But a better guide to Springsteen's development are the songs "Stolen Car" and the album-closing "Wreck on the Highway," gentle, moody ballads imbued with a sense of hopelessness that anticipate his next record, <i>Nebraska</i>.</p>&mdash; <b>William Ruhlmann</b>
Bruce Springsteen Nebraska <p>There is an adage in the record business that a recording artist's demos of new songs often come off better than the more polished versions later worked up in a studio. But Bruce Springsteen was the first person to act on that theory, when he opted to release the demo versions of his latest songs, recorded with only acoustic or electric guitar, harmonica, and vocals, as his sixth album, Nebraska. It was really the content that dictated the approach, however. Nebraska's ten songs marked a departure for Springsteen, even as they took him farther down a road he had been traveling previously. Gradually, his songs had become darker and more pessimistic, and those on Nebraska marked a new low. They also found him branching out into better developed stories. The title track was a first-person account of the killing spree of mass murderer Charlie Starkweather. (It can't have been coincidental that the same story was told in director Terrence Malick's 1973 film Badlands, also used as a Springsteen song title.) That song set the tone for a series of portraits of small-time criminals, desperate people, and those who loved them. Just as the recordings were unpolished, the songs themselves didn't seem quite finished; sometimes the same line turned up in two songs. But that only served to unify the album. Within the difficult times, however, there was hope, especially as the album went on. "Open All Night" was a Chuck Berry-style rocker, and the album closed with "Reason to Believe," a song whose hard-luck verses were belied by the chorus -- even if the singer couldn't understand what it was, "people find some reason to believe." Still, Nebraska was one of the most challenging albums ever released by a major star on a major record label.</p><p>&mdash; <strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p>
Bruce Springsteen Nebraska <p>There is an adage in the record business that a recording artist's demos of new songs often come off better than the more polished versions later worked up in a studio. But Bruce Springsteen was the first person to act on that theory, when he opted to release the demo versions of his latest songs, recorded with only acoustic or electric guitar, harmonica, and vocals, as his sixth album, Nebraska. It was really the content that dictated the approach, however. Nebraska's ten songs marked a departure for Springsteen, even as they took him farther down a road he had been traveling previously. Gradually, his songs had become darker and more pessimistic, and those on Nebraska marked a new low. They also found him branching out into better developed stories. The title track was a first-person account of the killing spree of mass murderer Charlie Starkweather. (It can't have been coincidental that the same story was told in director Terrence Malick's 1973 film Badlands, also used as a Springsteen song title.) That song set the tone for a series of portraits of small-time criminals, desperate people, and those who loved them. Just as the recordings were unpolished, the songs themselves didn't seem quite finished; sometimes the same line turned up in two songs. But that only served to unify the album. Within the difficult times, however, there was hope, especially as the album went on. "Open All Night" was a Chuck Berry-style rocker, and the album closed with "Reason to Believe," a song whose hard-luck verses were belied by the chorus -- even if the singer couldn't understand what it was, "people find some reason to believe." Still, Nebraska was one of the most challenging albums ever released by a major star on a major record label.</p><p>&mdash; <strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p>
Bruce Springsteen Born In The USA <p>Bruce Springsteen had become increasingly downcast as a songwriter during his recording career, and his pessimism bottomed out with Nebraska. But Born in the U.S.A., his popular triumph, which threw off seven Top Ten hits and became one of the best-selling albums of all time, trafficked in much the same struggle, albeit set to galloping rhythms and set off by chiming guitars. That the witless wonders of the Reagan regime attempted to co-opt the title track as an election-year campaign song wasn't so surprising: the verses described the disenfranchisement of a lower-class Vietnam vet, and the chorus was intended to be angry, but it came off as anthemic. Then, too, Springsteen had softened his message with nostalgia and sentimentality, and those are always crowd-pleasers. "Glory Days" may have employed Springsteen's trademark disaffection, yet it came across as a couch potato's drunken lament. But more than anything else, Born in the U.S.A. marked the first time that Springsteen's characters really seemed to relish the fight and to have something to fight for. They were not defeated ("No Surrender"), and they had friendship ("Bobby Jean") and family ("My Hometown") to defend. The restless hero of "Dancing in the Dark" even pledged himself in the face of futility, and for Springsteen, that was a step. The "romantic young boys" of his first two albums, chastened by "the working life" encountered on his third, fourth, and fifth albums and having faced the despair of his sixth, were still alive on this, his seventh, with their sense of humor and their determination intact. Born in the U.S.A. was their apotheosis, the place where they renewed their commitment and where Springsteen remembered that he was a rock & roll star, which is how a vastly increased public was happy to treat him.</p><p>&mdash; <strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p>
Bruce Springsteen Dancing In The Dark
Bruce Springsteen Live 1975 - 1985 <p>Long before he sold substantial numbers of records, Bruce Springsteen began to earn a reputation as the best live act in rock & roll. Fans had been clamoring for a live album for a long time, and with Live 1975-85 they got what they wanted, at least in terms of bulk. His concerts were marathons, and this box set, including 40 tracks and running over three and a half hours, was about the average length of a show. In his brief liner notes, Springsteen spoke of the emergence of the album's "story" as he reviewed live tapes, and that story seems nothing less than a history of his life, his concerns, and his career. The first cuts present the Springsteen of the early to mid-'70s; these performances, most of them drawn from a July 1978 show at the Roxy in Los Angeles, give us the romantic, hopeful, earnest Springsteen of "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" and "Thunder Road." The second section begins with his first Top Ten hit, "Hungry Heart" -- this is the Springsteen of the late '70s and early '80s, an arena rock star with working-class concerns. After an acoustic mini-set given largely to material from Nebraska -- songs of economic desperation and crime -- comes a reshuffling of Born in the U.S.A., songs in which Springsteen and his characters start to fight back and rock out. Finally, he brings it all back home to New Jersey, starting with the unofficial state anthem, "Born to Run," and including "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" and "Jersey Girl." Fans could rejoice that it found room for seven previously unreleased songs, including "Because the Night," but it wasn't as funny, as moving, or as exhilarating as a Springsteen show could be. Maybe no single album, however long, could have been, but where Springsteen impressed in concert because he tried so hard, here he seemed to have tried a little too hard to make a live album carry the freight of everything he had to say.</p><p>&mdash; <strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p>
Bruce Springsteen My Hometown (SP)
Bruce Springsteen Chimes Of Freedom (EP) <p>Culled from recordings of Bruce Springsteen's spring 1988 Tunnel of Love tour, Chimes of Freedom is a four-track EP that initially was released as a benefit for Amnesty International, appearing as he joined the fall 1988 Human Rights Now! tour. It was recorded and released quickly, easily qualifying as the speediest project Springsteen has ever completed. Unfortunately, it occasionally feels a little slapdash, but it's hard to criticize a four-song live charity EP for being haphazardly assembled, since that's in its nature. Nevertheless, Chimes of Freedom is a little unsatisfying, even though it's a good, brief sampler of the Boss live circa Tunnel of Love. And that's part of the problem. Tunnel of Love had a slicker production than a normal Springsteen record, featuring synths scattered throughout the record. Those arrangements were preserved on the live version of "Tougher Than the Rest," one of the best songs from the record, and it turns a little mushy in an arena setting. Similarly, the title track has its chiming opening refrain played on synths, and consequently it sounds a little stiff and dated. These faults are balanced by the remaining two cuts, the first released version of the excellent "Be True" and a reworking of "Born to Run" as an acoustic ballad. "Born to Run" has considerable power in this stripped-down setting, and "Be True" teems with life, pointing out how stiff its cousins sound on Chimes of Freedom. Neither of these tracks are major contributions to Springsteen's catalog, but they're nice additions for the die-hard fans who will be picking up the EP anyway.</p><p>&mdash; <strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p>
Bruce Springsteen In Concert <p>Released in Europe to coincide with Bruce Springsteen's spring 1993 tour of the continent, this album is a 13-track, nearly 72-minute audio version of Springsteen's video concert broadcast on MTV in the fall of 1992. It was part of the network's Unplugged series, but after performing the first, previously unheard song "Red Headed Woman" alone on guitar, Springsteen shouted, "All right, let's rock it!," and departed from the acoustic format. (The album's title has an "X" drawn through the "Un" of "Unplugged.") Eight of the selections come from Springsteen's 1992 albums <i>Human Touch</i> and <i>Lucky Town</i>, and the relatively minor tracks from the former benefit from being sequenced among the more ambitious songs from the latter and such old favorites as "Darkness on the Edge of Town" and "Thunder Road." Though Springsteen and his new band don't "rock it" too hard for the most part, a notable exception is a performance of the previously unrecorded "Light of Day," a title song Springsteen wrote for a 1987 movie. Here, he gives a taste of the enthusiasm and spontaneity he can bring to his live performances. But this is an album of small pleasures rather than a major performance statement.</p>&mdash; <b>William Ruhlmann</b>
Bruce Springsteen Human Touch <p>Bruce Springsteen has always been steeped in mainstream pop/rock music, using it as a vocabulary for what he wanted to say about weightier matters. And he has always written generic pop as well, though he's usually given the results away to performers like Southside Johnny and Gary "U.S." Bonds. Sometimes, those songs have been hits -- think of the Pointer Sisters' "Fire" or Bonds' "This Little Girl Is Mine." Occasionally, Springsteen has used such material here and there on his own albums; some of it can be found on The River, for example. But Human Touch was the first Bruce Springsteen album to consist entirely of this kind of minor genre material, material he seems capable of turning out endlessly and effortlessly -- the point of "I Wish I Were Blind" is that the singer doesn't want to see, now that his baby has left him; "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)" is about TV; "Real Man" finds the singer declaring that, while he may not be an action hero like Rambo, he feels like a real man in his baby's arms. And Springsteen, having largely jettisoned the E Street Band (keyboardist Roy Bittan remained), enlisted some sturdy minor talent to play and sing, among them ace studio drummer Jeff Porcaro (on one of his final recording sessions), Sam Moore of Sam & Dave, and Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers. It's pleasant enough stuff, and easy to listen to, but it is not the kind of record Springsteen had conditioned his audience to expect, and its release brought considerable disappointment. The reaction was exacerbated by the drawn-out release schedule that by 1992 had become common to superstars: this simply wasn't the record Springsteen fans had waited four and a half years to hear. Though at nearly 59 minutes it was the longest single-disc album of his career (which is not even counting the fact that a second whole album was released simultaneously), and though it contained several songs that could have been big hits -- the "Tunnel of Love" sound-alike title track, which actually made the Top 40, "Roll of the Dice," an AOR radio favorite, "Man's Job," and even "Soul Driver," which belonged on the next Southside album -- Human Touch was an uninspired Bruce Springsteen album, his first that didn't at least aspire to greatness. Springsteen may have put out the more substantial Lucky Town at the same time in recognition of the relatively slight nature of the material here.</p><p>&mdash; <strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p>
Bruce Springsteen 57 Channels [EP] </p>This EP contains two remixes of the second single from Bruce Springsteen's Human Touch album done by "Little" Steven Van Zandt, a member of Springsteen's former backup group, The E Street Band. The remixes are dominated by soundbites from television, circa 1992, especially references to the Los Angeles riot and Vice President Dan Quayle's controversial remarks about the Murphy Brown TV show. The disc's 23-and-a-half minute running time is filled out by "There's A Riot Goin' On," a third, more radical remix of "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)," that retains little of the original song beyond its chorus and rhythm track, and the non-album song "Part Man, Part Monkey."</p><p>&mdash; <strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p>
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