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.
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| © 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.
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| © 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.
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| © 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.
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| © Simon Poulter 2016 |
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.
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| © Simon Poulter 2016 |
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