Letter From America: The Boss is back

What did you do during lockdown (and by that I mean the first lockdown…)? Did you discover the joys of Zoom? Were you sucked into a weekly online quiz with your extended family? Did you acquire a new hobby? Eat yourself into a Jabba The Hut-sized mound? Finally make use of that yoga mat you’d bought but never used? Or, perhaps you did a Captain Tom, and walked yourself into the record books and the nation’s hearts. 

If you’re a musician, lockdown has possibly been a boon to creativity, if only to compensate for tours not going ahead. Look at Paul McCartney - he recorded McCartney III, out in December, on his own at his studio in Sussex, handling all the instruments himself. And I bet it’ll be a corker.

Though this took place last November (a sweeter, disease-free time, right?), Bruce Springsteen’s approach to housebound boredom is to invite your mates round and, in a week, put together a new album. Not that those mates are anyone: they’re called the E-Street Band. And the album is Letter To You. 

Recorded over five days at The Boss’s home in Colts Neck, New Jersey, a twenty-minute drive from Asbury Park and the real Jersey Shore so steeped in Springsteen history, the album, in his own words, “turned out to be one of the greatest recording experiences I’ve ever had.” That might sound hyperbolic, but Springsteen says there’s a “emotional nature” to the album that he loves, a point that comes across in the Apple TV making-of film about the album. It shows the camaraderie of a group - trusted sidekick Stevie Van Zandt, Patti Scialfa (Mrs. Springsteen), Nils Lofgren, Roy Bittan, Max Weinberg, Garry Tallent, Charlie Giordano and Jake Clemons (the ‘Big Man’, Clarence’s sax-playing nephew) - crafting an album, a band Springsteen says in the film informs how he writes, inspiring him to “write big”. 

Back in the spring of 1974, Springsteen and the band started work on the Born To Run album, labouring over the next 14 months - six of which on the title track alone - to create scale, something akin to the Spector ‘wall of sound’. It was an angry, frustrating time for all concerned, but ultimately, the exhaustive process produced a perennial classic. In sharp contrast, Letter To You took a fraction of the time to make, but the result is, it has to be said, equally impressive. That said, some songs on the album took an awful long time to reach a record: the epic If I Was A Priest was originally written for the Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. album, Springsteen’s debut almost 50 years ago. Dusted off and finally recorded in the November session last year, it’s as fresh as anything more freshly minted, even for a song which treads somewhat on religious sensitivities by imagining Jesus walking through the Wild West. Significantly, it has an important place in Springsteen lore, being one of the songs he played for Columbia Records executives at their first meeting in May 1972, prompting label boss John Hammond to hope that every song on the artist’s debut LP would be like it. 

Another resurrected from the 1970s is Janey Needs A Shooter (which Warren Zevon purloined with The Boss’s permission for his 1980 song Jeannie Needs A Shooter), while Songs For Orphans also dates back to the Greetings era, and has only previously been heard in public before at a single show 2005 Devils And Dust tour. “It's wonderful how the older songs fit so well into this album, Van Zandt told Forbes recently. “It's remarkable really. That, Janey Needs A Shooter and Songs For Orphans are all from the early '70s. To have something fit so well 50 years later - oh my God, I swear we have completely redefined chronological time, I'm telling you! I think rock and roll has changed science. Seventy is the new 40.”

Picture: Bruce Springsteen, 2020/Danny Clinch

Springsteen is now 71, but as if proof that age is just a number, Letter To You arrives in what feels like a period of unblinking industriousness. Like his near-contemporary Neil Young (or even, come to think of it, his somewhat British equivalent Paul Weller), there has been little sign of slowing down as he reaches his more senior years. Letter To You is his fourth in eight years, his second since 2014’s High Hopes with the E-Street band fully on board, and comes just a year after the wonderful Western Stars. All this, the Born To Run autobiography, and that extended run of Springsteen On Broadway, his New York residency that ran for five shows a week from October 2017 until December. The following year. Much like his legendary, near-four hour concerts, Springsteen has never done things by halves.

“I’m at a point in my playing life and artistic life where I’ve never felt as vital,” he recently told the New York Times. “My band is at its best, and we have so much accumulated knowledge and craft about what we do that this was a time in my life where I said, ‘I want to use that as much as I can.’” The product of this is an album recorded live and without need for endless overdubs, but also an album of undeniable energy, power and subtle texture in tremendous balance and, somehow, an inherent sense of love and camaraderie. Missing, of course, from this are the late Danny Federici and Clemons Snr, though their spirits - as witnessed frequently in the Apple TV documentary, are never far from any of the band’s hearts, least of whom, Springsteen himself. The band’s closeness undoubtedly was the fuel that drove the making of Letter To You.

“I had cut a song on the record called Janey Needs A Shooter earlier on for a one-off for Record Store Day,” Springsteen recently told America’s National Public Radio. “But when I listened back to it, it was the closest thing the band had ever sounded to Darkness On The Edge of Town. You know, that was because we all played together and sang at one time, and because we relied only on the instrumentation of the band and no overdubs. So I said, well, I'd be interested in making a record where we return to the template of Darkness On The Edge of Town. And so, consequently, I made no demos of the songs. I simply recorded them on my acoustic guitar into my iPhone, waited until the band got here, played in the songs on an acoustic guitar and then we went and performed the music.” 

“I knew I wanted to make a record with the band,” Springsteen added in his New York Times interview. “I knew I wanted it to be the pure instrumentation of the band: two keyboards, the guitars, the bass, drums and saxophone, and I didn’t want anything else. I didn’t want to demo or have preconceptions of the music, so I didn’t touch the songs until I taught them to the band. The approach is confirmed by Van Zandt, who told Forbes: “I kept emphasising if [Springsteen and the E-Street Band] do make another record - and it was really not clear if we ever would - but I said, 'If we do, let's go back to the old way’, which we had done on three records, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The River and Born In The USA, where Bruce walks in with an acoustic guitar, plays his songs and everybody has a chance to give their input.”

The result is a classic Springsteen album, neither melancholy or overtly upbeat, but a continuation of the reflective mood he’s been in since the autobiographical period of his book and Broadway show. Along with the songs written in another time, there are nostalgic hat-tips to the past, such as the stonking Last Man Standing, which pays tribute to his teenage band, The Castiles, of which - he reveals in the Apple TV film - he is now the only surviving member. There is similar thought for mortality and absent friends on I’ll See You In My Dreams. While the dynamics of Letter To You may not vary from expectations of what a Bruce Springsteen/E-Street Band album should offer, there is so much more to enjoy that just the comfort food of familiarity. The understated opener, One Minute You're Here is as tender as the title track that follows it, or as prototypical as Ghosts, perhaps serving the simple purpose of being a celebration of what it is to be in this brotherhood of musicians.

Rock bands are, in general, uneven communities. Invariably riven by ego, creative tension and mismatched personalities, they are often held together by artistic tension alone. Bruce Springsteen has, at his disposal, an unique family, even when he dips into the E-Street collective on his 'pure' solo albums. Together they produce something no other entity in rock music is capable of. As hackneyed as it is to say, they are truly more than the sum of their parts. Letter To You, with its raw simplicity, its power and energy is an album to savour, for sure, but also one to just enjoy for what it is. And it may well be one of the best that Bruce Springsteen and his gang have ever produced.

Home on the range - Bruce Springsteen's Western Stars

The Boss has been in a reflective mood of late. Since his last studio album, five years ago, he’s released his excellent autobiography, Born To Run, and ran his one-man stage show Springsteen On Broadway for the better part of 14 months (despite it being only meant to last for a single month), in both, drawing on his blue collar childhood in Freehold, New Jersey, the thunderclap moments of seeing Elvis and, later, The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and his becoming America's most earnest rock star, journeying from Asbury Park pubs to the world's biggest stadia.

Looked at from some angles, Springsteen has always been something of a caricature: the denim, the absence of some of the personality accoutrements of other rock stars, the relentless earnestness and singular attachment to his working class roots but also the musical roots of America, be it folk, country, blues, rockabilly, rock and roll, even straight up pop. It's a guise as distinct as any of the costumes that Bowie adopted, but with The Dame they were always theatrical masks. With The Boss, the blue collar look, the worker boots and workshirts have been a uniform. He has, himself, confessed to some fraudulence, that when he was writing about cars, of riding through "mansions of glory in suicide machines" and being "sprung from cages out on Highway 9" he didn't even own a driving licence. Others have circled his stylistic orbit, be it the late Tom Petty or Gary US Bonds, as well as his associates and band members, like Stevie van Zandt or Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes. Only Bruce has been and remains as distinct a brand, an American brand, if you will, as Levi Strauss, Budweiser or Cadillac.

As he approaches his 70th birthday this September, the nostalgic glances over the shoulder have become more profound, but it’s hard to tell whether Western Stars, his 19th studio album and the first collection of new material since 2014’s High Hopes, casts a winsome gaze over the cowboy culture of Roy Rogers and the early 1950s television the young Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen may have been exposed to in that South Street, Freehold, house, or something else. Because, obviously, over the last five years, the America Springsteen has, in one way, shape or another, eulogised throughout his career, has undergone it’s most dramatic, some might even say disturbing schism in several generations.

Not that Western Stars wavers far from the classic Springsteen narrative. Laid over a painted backdrop of gentle, Bachach strings with infusions of brass and melodies redolent of Glen Campbell, it is a glorious continuation of his American romanticisation, choosing the nation’s western reaches as, perhaps, a symbol of the hope and ambition it once presented when the early pioneers and their wagon trains headed out that way. The irony of this, of course, is that one never got the impression from his book that Springsteen enjoyed his time living in Los Angeles, moving himself and his family there at the start of the 1990s, only to move back to New Jersey at the end of that decade. “I didn’t do a lot of work,” he once told Rolling Stone of his time living in California. “Some people would say I didn’t do my best work.” Poignantly, significantly, he was back living in eastern New Jersey when 9/11 happened, giving Springsteen a sickening view of his America being attacked in Lower Manhattan that Tuesday morning from beyond the Jersey Shore and Sandy Hook Bay. It resulted in The Rising, arguably his best work for a long time.

Picture: Bruce Springsteen

Western Stars can, rightfully, fit into that same bracket. It’s as satisfying a Bruce Springsteen record as he’s committed to tape, a lavish comfort meal, if you will, at a time when there’s so much about the United States that we need comforting about. It contextualises life in the deserts and vast scrublands west of the Mississippi for the challenges they present now, and would have done so for those wagon trains on their quest for the promised land. Some of this is probably more than metaphorical: Springsteen has written and spoken of his struggles with depression, and how family life has provided the perfect counter balance. Chasin’ Wild Horses, for example, may well be one such song that evokes the Wild West’s expanse while bringing it home to Colts Neck, the ranch barely six miles from Freehold where the Springsteen family is now based, and which provided the platform for his daughter Jessica to become an internationally competitive show jumping champion.

Despite this return to almost where it all began ("Born to come back," he joked in the On Broadway show. "Who'd have bought that? Nobody."), throughout Western Stars there’s a longing for freedom, still the core of most culture about the American West. Hitch Hikin’ is the folkiest of the album’s material, a song that builds from acoustic simplicity to one as sweeping as the scenic landscape the itinerant traveller heading west will encounter, telling the story through the eyes of three individuals, each with their own ambitions and dreams. Similarly, The Wayfarer recounts a wanderlust spirit that is, perhaps, as representative of Springsteen’s own displacement in his own land as that of a good yarn about the freedom of the road. There’s a similar sense of adventure in Ulysees, potentially the most personal of all the songs on this album, as it tells of an ageing traveller confronted by his dotage, reflecting on a life lived on the road and concluding that he’s not done yet. I think you can see where the author is going.

Tales from Thunder Road: Bruce Springsteen's autobiography Born To Run

There was no Damascene moment. I wasn't blinded by the light, to borrow a phrase. No sudden realisation. And it was hardly a conversion, either. But my becoming a Bruce Springsteen fan, as opposed to merely knowing his songs, came relatively late in my life, and relatively late in his career. The summer of 2002, to be precise. The reason why will sound somewhat corny, but bear with me.

The terror attacks on September 11, 2001, affected me more deeply than perhaps I realised on the day. Then, I was living in California, and like so many other people in America - and indeed around the world - it all seemed to happen in vivid, searing real-time. Like everyone else, I'd consumed the news coverage of the Twin Towers being attacked and destroyed. Afterwards it was hard to focus on anything, such was the collective fear that the attacks were only just the beginning of a more sustained onslaught. Over the following weeks and months I was restless. Concentrating at work was a struggle as I fought with a constant need to go to online to see what new developments there were in the aftermath of the single-biggest terrorist mass murder in history.

The hijackings and their attacks on New York and the Pentagon, plus, we presume, the targeting of Washington DC, cast a pall over me. A medical professional might have even called it a form of depression. There had been something so brutal and violent about the taking of those 2,977 lives, most in a city I loved to visit for its relentless energy and verve. I was struggling to properly process what had happened. But then, right smack in the middle of the following July, I heard the song The Rising for the first time, and was moved. An anthemic song, majestic, and yet conversely concerned with a theme so dark and somewhat surreal, that of a doomed New York firefighter entering the World Trade Center just after the hijacked planes had come slamming in. And, yet, I felt uplifted by the song, released, even, from the gloom that had descended upon me ever since that grim Tuesday morning the September before.

I bought the album The Rising on the day it came out at the end of July. I soon discovered the 9/11 narrative within it. It became the catharsis I’d been lacking. Its title song, along with Lonesome Day, You’re Missing and My City In Ruins provided tangible expression of what the world had so brutally witnessed collectively. And in doing so, these songs opened the curtains wide on what it was that had propelled Bruce Springsteen to his exalted status as America’s greatest rock star.

The starting point was Springsteen's authenticity. His home in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey, close to the Jersey Shore where he grew up, is not much more than 30 miles, as the crow flies, from where the old World Trade Center stood. Like so many residents of the Greater New York area, Springsteen watched from his kitchen window as the towers burned before crumbling into a toxic pile of rubble and dust. He spoke for the victims, many of whom came from the New York hinterland that sprawls out into New Jersey. He was New Jersey - working class Jersey. Of all the celebrities who came out to support of the 9/11 victims, Springsteen was unequivocally one of them. His words resonated.

So, suddenly, my eyes - more pertinently, my ears - were open. I was no newcomer to Springsteen - the radio hits like Born In The USA, Dancing In The Dark, Born To Run, Cover Me and Brilliant Disguise, had just been that, radio hits. Like everyone else, I’d gone with Born In The USA as simplistic, fist-pumping patriotism without giving too much thought to its real meaning about a Vietnam veteran struggling for acceptance. And Born To Run - unexpectedly popularised by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, of all bands - was simply a rollicking good rock song. It was only later that I started to place that song into a wider context about Springsteen’s songwriting. That came when I belatedly got around to seeing Cop Land, the superb crime thriller starring Sylvester Stallone as a partially deaf local sheriff living amongst a nest of corrupt New York cops (De Niro, Keitel, Liotta et al) in the small New Jersey community he also polices. The local connection with Springsteen was made by the inclusion of Drive All Night and Stolen Car from Springsteen’s album The River. This prompted me to buy The River itself, along with Born To Run, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Nebraska and Springsteen’s debut Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. The river, so to speak, had burst its banks.

Vicariously, I had began to immerse myself in an America I’d hitherto not been exposed to. My first visits to the country had been to California and the golden West, not the industrial, grey-skied badlands of the north-east. I have since driven up Highway 9 in New Jersey, heading north from Springsteen's hometown of Freehold to the outer suburbs of Newark. Hardly a last-chance power drive, but it seemed to fall into place with the oil-stained, denim-clad ordinality of Springsteen’s music.

Like many of America’s greatest songwriters, Springsteen can conjure romance out of the most mundane. Freeways, diners and dance halls possess a thrill and zeal that British motorways, greasy-spoon cafés and provincial discos do not. Cadillacs and Chevys, Lincolns and Fords, already immortalised in the classics of rock and roll, were part of the furniture of the ‘real’ America Springsteen wrote about. His cast of characters were the downtrodden and the poor, the dreamers and the ill-fated lovers.

Springsteen’s music is nothing new and never has been. A song like Brilliant Disguise is pure Roy Orbison, and of course his signature sound was cast with the Born To Run album and its unashamed purloining of Phil Spector. But then rock’n’roll has ever been thus. More or less any artist you like can point to Elvis Presley as the source, Chuck Berry and Little Richard as the catalyst, and The Beatles as the perfect application of the art. Even The Clash and the Sex Pistols can hold their hands up and agree that Presley influenced their look and Berry influenced their guitar solos. The Beatles' Helter Skelter even provided the blueprint for most punk songs.

Picture: Vanity Fair/Annie Leibowitz

Springsteen isn’t, however, merely someone who has aggregated these influences, thrown in Dylan, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger for rustic authenticity and arrived at being the heart and soul of salt-of-the-earth America. But he has taken Americana as his canvass and then musically and lyrically fused the 1950s of his childhood with his adulthood and beyond. The screen doors slamming and motorbikes tearing up highways haven’t just been dutiful nods to the age of chrome fenders and billowing gathered skirts, but characters in mini operettas created around small town romances and economic reality. These were themes that I’d never paid much attention to previously, even listening to blues music, which is mostly only about such topics. There was another aspect, too, to the all-enveloping nature of Springsteen’s music: that they offered an incredible soundscape, the so-called “heartland rock” of the E-Street Band - Clarence’s sax, Roy Bittan’s chiming piano and the jangling guitars of The Boss himself. Having always been drawn to more introspective or, perhaps, more complicated, layered music, I had to change up a gear to appreciate Springsteen's music at its fullest.

In doing so, however, I came to see beyond the radio-friendly MTV star, bopping away with a young Courteney Cox in that still-excruciating Dancing In The Dark video. All of a sudden I realised that musically, Springsteen was every bit as compelling as those ‘classic’ British bands I’d considered without-question to be the greatest. There were parallels, I found, between Springsteen and, say, The Who. The British group’s music might have been tighter, even more intense, but to both there was a reflection on what it is to live in the real world. Punk, they say, was the embodiment of this spirit too.

I have a habit of coming to bands late. It’s partly the result of a stubborn blindspot I have which shuts out hype. Once the cognoscenti endorses something, I succumb to immediate suspicion and cast it to one side. The Springsteen myth - all that talk of legendary, four-hour concerts and blue-collar authenticity - had previously had a reverse effect on me and my cynicism. But with The Rising, its predecessors and its successors, I took to consuming Springsteen old and new at any opportunity. Live albums, albums with and without the E-Street Band, offshoots, box sets - you name it, I’ve come to absorb everything the man produces, musically and, perhaps more importantly, lyrically.

Inevitably, Born To Run, Bruce Springsteen’s long-awaited autobiography, out today, has taken me in too, but then I’m a sucker for a music memoir. And there’s always plenty to choose from - Keith Richards’ Life and Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace stand out as particular highlights of the genre, and there have been more recent entries by Chrissie Hynde, Linda Rondstadt, Donald Fagen and Graham Nash. Even Phil Collins and Johnny Marr are getting in on the act with their respective Not Dead Yet and Set The Boy Free tomes coming up in time for Christmas. And, of course, no shortage of weighty books about The Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bowie and many more, many of which are still piled high on my dining table awaiting their turn.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Born To Run - which has taken Springsteen the better part of seven years to write - is exhaustive. And it unlocks something about this self-effacing and seemingly open rock star, who almost lives like we do (albeit on a 340-acre New Jersey farm and homes in gated communities in Florida and California...). In an era when celebrity can be created out of nothing (i.e. "starring" in reality television), someone of Springsteen's stature probably doesn't need to commit himself to an unexpurgated memoir. But the seed was planted in 2009, after Springsteen and the E-Street Band had played at that year's Super Bowl, and he wrote a blog post for his website about his experience of playing during the half-time show. Over the following months, he found himself keeping a diary of sorts, enjoyed writing it, and enjoyed the voice that it gave him. The writing process snowballed further, resulting in the book. Written entirely by Springsteen himself. No ghost writers.

A first glimpse of Springsteen's expanded writing "voice" came in March 2012 at South By Southwest in Austin, when he gave a mesmerising keynote speech - perhaps the ultimate essay on rock and roll. "In the beginning, every musician has their genesis moment," he outlined. "For you, it might have been the Sex Pistols, or Madonna, or Public Enemy. It's whatever initially inspires you to action. Mine was 1956, Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show. It was the evening I realized a white man could make magic, that you did not have to be constrained by your upbringing, by the way you looked, or by the social context that oppressed you. You could call upon your own powers of imagination, and you could create a transformative self."

These are themes Springsteen comes back on in the book in large dollops. In particular, about not being constrained by upbringing and his background. "I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I," he writes in the foreword. "By 20, no race car-driving rebel, I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and already a member in good standing amongst those who 'lie' in service of the truth...artists with a small 'a'. But I held four clean aces. I had youth, almost a decade of hard-core bar band experience, a good group of homegrown musicians who were attuned to my performance style and a story to tell."

At this point, in many a rock memoir, the author would talk about chord shapes and grand visions for changing the world. But in trying to pick the lock of how he ended up "face-to-face with eighty thousand (or eighty) screaming rock'n'roll fans who are waiting for you to do your magic trick", Springsteen starts at the very beginning - the working class New Jersey family into which he was born, and the strained relationship he endured with his often violent and often unemployed father. Douglas Springsteen was of Dutch-Irish ancestry, while Bruce’s mother, Adele, was of Italian-American background. You probably couldn’t find a more atypical north-eastern American cocktail. Douglas worked different jobs, including driving buses and more often than not, no job at all. Adele worked as a legal secretary, and was invariably the family breadwinner. No surprise, then, that through this childhood in the town of Freehold, New Jersey, that the young Bruce - captivated by the music of Elvis and The Beatles - was drawn to “poetry, danger and darkness” to drive his imagination. Throughout his songbook, Springsteen comes back to paternal relationships, and in the book, he expounds on his own at some length. "I had to find the roots of my own troubles and issues," he recently told Vanity Fair while publicising the book, "and the joyful things that have allowed me to put on the kind of shows that we put on."

The catalyst of how Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen, born September 23, 1949, became Bruce Springsteen: The Boss is well explored in Born To Run. He describes his first guitar (bought for him by his mother) and, after his parents virtually abandoned him as they moved to California, the late-teenage Bruce taught himself piano and the harmonica, and joined his first bands playing the seaside towns along the Jersey Shore. Those who see pop stardom as only a few X-Factor appearances away might do well to read this book, to see how it should be done, and the rags-to-riches graft - I offer no apology for the cliche - that took him from eeking out a living in doo-wop bar bands to being, arguably, the greatest live performer in business today.

Even just four years before Time magazine put him on the cover declaring him in three simple words “Rock’s New Sensation”, Springsteen was still in the throes of poverty. Even once signed to Columbia Records, he didn’t have the single dollar needed to drive through the Holland tunnel to collect his record company advance. He had just 99 cents in loose change. Depression is another theme that Springsteen covers in depth in the book. It’s an affliction plenty of artists succumb to and have succumbed to - some almost as a badge of honour for their art - but in Springsteen’s case he talks about his occasional struggles with depression as a consequence of his family origins, and a need for control (for that, see my blog post from August last year on the 40th anniversary of the album Born To Run being released). The collapse of his first marriage, to actress Julianne Phillips, led to him “…sliding back toward the chasm where rage, fear, distrust, insecurity and family-patented misogyny made war with my better angels.” Armchair Freudians will no doubt want to study this section in detail.

One of the joys of Keith Richards’ Life was that it wasn’t just about - in fact it hardly was at all - ribald tales of life on the road as one of rock music’s greatest hell-raisers. In fact, there was more about life as a Stone in Ronnie Wood’s autobiography, Ronnie. Richards cast deep into his family origins, his upbringing in post-war, lower-middle class Dartford, of how an extended family was both a blessing and a curse. Born To Run covers very similar ground, in fact, in very similar geography. Like so many of that generation, rock music - especially Elvis - led them out of the darkness of austerity and 1950s strictness. Music became a beacon, a torch, and it’s no wonder that so much of that experience has been worked into Springsteen’s music. Most of it, he now admits, has been autobiographical (Rosalita, for example, is the account of losing his virginity), but there’s clearly been more to come forth, and that’s where the book Born To Run plays its part.

Funny in places, dark in others - especially when facing up to the bouts of depression that have come at him over the years, it transposes the man I saw on July 13 this year, bouncing about for almost four hours on stage in Paris, into someone you may never get to know personally, and yet will feel like you have done by the end of reading it. It will shed light on your own families, your own relationships with your own family. But most of all, in era when the people we most admire are tweeting what they have for breakfast, Born To Run goes some way to break down barriers between us and someone who can rightfully be described as one of the greatest rock stars in the history of rock stardom.

Blowin' a fuse: Bruce Springsteen at the AccorHotels Arena, Paris

Somebody recently asked me an impossible question: "what's your favourite gig of all time?". I was stumped. And for a number of reasons, too. I've been to many, many concerts over the last 36 years, some for fun, some for work, and in that time I've seen the stellar, the obscure, the legendary, the unfashionable, the overhyped and the just plain brilliant.

I've seen the Rolling Stones four times, and The Who and Prince twice; in seeing Robert Plant (twice in the space of a month) and Paul McCartney just the once I have at least experienced some linkage to two of the greatest bands of all time. Sadly, though, I only saw Bowie once, and that was on the awful Glass Spider Tour. Thank God for the live recordings.

My brief career as a music journalist began with the first and, possibly, last review of a Phil Collins gig in the NME. I was at the legendary Madstock festival which, so the apocryphal tale goes, was measured on the Richter Scale, such was the mass pogo triggered by Madness playing Baggy Trousers. At the same gig I finally got to see Ian Dury & The Blockheads, a long-held ambition and richly rewarded, and I also saw Morrissey get booed, which was harsh but funny. I've also enjoyed some of the most brilliant evenings of live music at the Montreux Jazz Festival, often ending up sitting next to the same performers at the remarkably informal Harry's Bar across the road (an encounter with Grace Jones unnerves me still - she was just so damned nice).

Gig-going has been intrinsic to my life here in Paris over the last five and a half years: it reunited me with my childhood friend Steven Wilson, having last seen him in 1974, and now a bona fide rock star, playing Le Bataclan; the city's smaller, intimate venues have brought me into close proximity with Johnny Marr, the Stone Roses, Paul Weller, Richard Hawley, The Church, Popa Chubby, Seasick Steve and the Kaiser Chiefs - to name a few, and not a bad haul either; and, perhaps most poignant of all, I was privileged to be at the emotional return to Paris by the Eagles Of Death Metal in February.

Still, though, there are plenty of gigs I regret missing out on, as well as plenty of gigs I regret going to at all (The Wedding Present at a sticky-floored college refectory comes to mind). On top of this, I really have no desire to attend any outdoor festivals, unless they're within a half mile of a Tube station and have paved footpaths. And I can very easily pass on the overhyped festival of Trench Foot, chlamydia and corporate hypocrisy that is Glastonbury, preferring to watch from my sofa with all the comfort, convenience and proximity to a fridge that implies.

© Simon Poulter 2016

However, nothing upon nothing compares on any scale to Bruce Springsteen. I've now seen him twice, and both occasions in Paris, too. Quite why it has taken me to just the last five years, living here, before seeing one of the greatest live acts in music history is hard to fathom, but I have no time for regrets, as these two concerts - Wednesday night at the AccorHotels Arena and three years ago at the Stade De France - will answer, unequivocally, that question I was asked.

2016 has been a year which has forced us to rethink our notions of mortality when it comes to our music icons. It's nothing new: for as long as rock stars have been dying prematurely - Hendrix, Joplin, Presley, Lennon...take your pick - we've reluctantly accepted that some candles burn brightly for only the shortest of time. With Bowie et al this year we've started coming to terms with the realisation that the heroes of the rock era are dwindling, along with the music that propelled them to hero status in the first place.

Springsteen, however, continues to defy rock's waning. At 66 he's as energetic, engaging and as downright brilliant as any legend past or present. What he takes from his audiences he gives back in spades. The frequent trips throughout the show into the crowd might be viewed as schtick, but Springsteen never overplays it. He is for his people, and of his people. It's an unbreakable bond.

© Simon Poulter 2016

The Stones and The Who, to some extent, might still come close, and though both still excellent entertainment, the former are now something of a high-end vaudeville act and the latter are largely now trading off heritage as they consciously wind down their touring career. Springsteen, on the other hand, is still producing albums of some vitality. They may not be as ground breaking as Born To Run, Nebraska or The River which, in its entirety, forms the main act of this latest tour, but it is patently clear that The Boss has lost none of his unique ability to tell a story. Or to do so live.

Because that is what sits at the very core of the Springsteen brand. Whatever the scale of his epic, three-hour shows, or of the superlative bombast of his and the E-Street Band's sound, Springsteen at his best is the blue collar barfly, regaling you over a brew with a story about the mundanities of life. Not even Dylan can romanticise about crossing county lines, screen doors slamming and steaming engine blocks and still be as authentic or as heartworn. You may be looking at a multimillionaire rock star, but you are also looking at working class New Jersey. You are still listening to songs forged in 1950s imagery of girls in their finery at the Saturday night dance, of unrequited love affairs, marriages and the dawning of dissatisfaction and claustrophobic relationships.

Sitting in an arena just a stone's throw from the French government offices of Bercy may have been an incongruity from the 'real' America Springsteen evokes, but somehow, amongst 16,000 rapturous [mostly] French people, we were in that bar, that autoshop, that high school dance hall. To get there, though, you must allow yourself to penetrate the stagecraft of the E-Street Band - Steve Van Zandt's endearingly entertaining hamming; Nils Lofgren's guitar virtuosity; Roy Bittan's delicate touch on piano; the 65-year-old Max Weinberg's breathless, virtually uninterrupted drumming; and Jake Clemons' deft sax playing, keeping his uncle, Clarence's flame alive. Cut through that and you listen to Springsteen's words and music, in that order, absorbing and contributing to the energy of the band and of the crowd, and the overwhelming sense of being a part of something that, even 41 years since his breakthrough, is still growing.

© Simon Poulter 2016

While this magical show was devoted to The River album, it opened with an obscurity, Iceman, recorded in 1977 for the The Darkness On The Edge Of Town sessions and then forgotten about. It eventually surfaced on the absorbing Tracks box set. Tonight was, evidently, the first time Springsteen and his band had played it on this tour, and it - followed by Lucky Town - worked brilliantly in getting everyone's eye in, like tennis players 'knocking up' before a match.

These were, however, just a prelude. The main premise of the evening and the entire tour is The River. Springsteen's albums are never conceptual as such, but they are certainly reflective of the times. The River, released in October 1980, held a mirror up to an America in recession, on the cusp of electing an archly-conservative president a month later, and still bearing scars of Vietnam in its heartlands, in need of both togetherness and contemplation alone. As a result, Springsteen deliberately sequenced the 20-track double album to offer shade and light, with tracks as bold and as classically Spectorish as The Ties That Bind interspersed with more frivolous material like Sherry Darling and the hit Hungry Heart (during which Springsteen conducts a full-on stage dive in this show), the pathos of Point Blank leading to the hoedown gaiety of Cadillac Ranch (complete with Patti Scialfa stand-in Soozie Tyrell going full "yee-hah!" with a fiddle solo).

But where, on the original album, The River could be accused of being a little uneven, 36 years on, with an E-Street Band as finely tuned as the smoothest-running German car engine you could imagine, there is a power to all of the album's songs in the live setting, even the quiet numbers, like Drive All Night, engineered by Weinberg's simple slowbeat, building to a compelling crescendo.

As The River's stories unfold, so does your appreciation of the palette Springsteen applied to the album's storytelling. You end up with no other conclusion that you have heard a unique canon of songs, performed by a unique collection of musicians. Yes, it may be Springsteen's music, but he never lets it be forgotten that Springsteen and the E-Street Band - a genuine band of brothers (several of them postponed personal music projects to jump on The River Tour, jumping at the opportunity to tour again for a last time before Springsteen concentrates on solo projects) - are one and the same.

© Simon Poulter 2016

It may not be fashionable anymore to sit down and listen to an album all the way through, from track-first to track-last, but the trend of touring entire records means that artists have a captive audience to hear the sequencing as intended. I'm sure the streaming era is creating a generation of dilettante music fans, missing out on the narrative of the musical novels that albums like The River are. This show is, however, a reminder of just how fulsome The River is, but even taking into account Springsteen's legend for lengthy shows, the momentum is relentless.

Anyone dropping off will have been woken back to full consciousness by Ramrod, the explosive rocker which, on Monday night, literally blew a fuse at the Paris venue. Tonight, no such worries, as it took the show into The River's fourth and final side, in old vinyl terms, a side with two of the album's many nods to automotive iconography, concluding with Wreck On The Highway.

By this stage, however, the only wrecks are us - sweaty but carefree. Springsteen and his band have no intention of stopping, or even basking in the glory of having breathlessly played through an entire 83-minute album from start to finish. Almost without pause we're into the mighty Badlands, opening what turns out to be almost another hour of extra music, and is quickly followed by a cover of Patti Smith's Because The Night, which Springsteen originally wrote before handing it over to Smith.

The hits tumbled out - The Rising (inspired by 9/11 and as poignant in France now as it would be looking across to New York City from Springsteen's New Jersey home), the ironically patriotic Born In The USA, an outstanding Born To Run, Dancing In The Dark and then Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out, replete with dutiful on-screen tributes to the "the big man", the late Clarence Clemons, and original E-Street keyboard player Danny Federici, who died three years before the sax giant in 2008.

This second, hit-sprayed part ends with Shout, the Isleys' party favourite (some might think of Lulu, others, simply, "Toga!!!"), which ensures that all but the dullest, smartphone-hogging dullard (the Jeff Lynne-lookalike perched on the steps in front of me, for example) is on their feet and having, simply, the best of times.

And it is. If I never see another concert again I can and will have the satisfaction of experiencing something profound, something untouchable, akin to the Dutch notion of "total football", albeit with a travelling band of musicians who perform and behave more like a family than jobbing artists. What binds it all, of course, is Springsteen's songwriting. And thus, it is celebrated, fittingly, by the man himself, reappearing after his comrades have disappeared, with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, strumming the opening chords of Thunder Road.

"The screen door slams, Mary's dress waves, like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays Roy Orbison singing for the lonely," he sings. We are enraptured: all of the joy, all of the emotion, all of the fist-pumping energy of the previous three hours condensed into this most beautiful of ballads.

"Well, I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk". Damn right he did.

© Simon Poulter 2016