Pitchfork
85
Bruce Springsteen’s most cinematic, far-reaching songs begin with specifics—“Born down in a dead man’s town,” or “I come from down in the valley,” or “Here in Northeast Ohio, back in 1803”—before zooming out to illustrate how their characters and locales encapsulate bigger things: their class, their country, their generation. His ability to bring grand themes down to earth allows his greatest songs to light-up arenas while also feeling deeply personal, and it explains how he achieved a massive audience that still reveres him like a cult artist.
Springsteen’s personal writing hit a peak on 1987’s Tunnel of Love, the lonely, autumnal follow-up to the massive Born in the U.S.A. Think of it as an ’80s precursor to Lemonade: an artist responding to a groundbreaking pop-culture phenomenon with something deeply intimate and coyly autobiographical. Unlike the Vietnam vets and working-class heroes who dominated Born in the U.S.A., the protagonist throughout most of the songs on Tunnel of Love was an unhappy man entering middle age and confronting his failing marriage and his life choices. Following the tour after the album, Springsteen divorced his actress wife, moved to L.A., and fired the E Street Band, his loyal crew of lifelong friends and collaborators. Tunnel of Love was also followed by a five-year hiatus from releasing music or touring—the longest break yet in a career heretofore defined by his incessant work ethic.
The Christic Shows, the latest and arguably greatest release yet in Springsteen’s ongoing Live Archive series, was recorded in the middle of this hiatus. A long-standing fan favorite in bootleg form, the set compiles Springsteen’s one-off acoustic sets in support of the public interest law firm the Christic Institute, performed in the fall of 1990 at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium. It remains an essential if uncharacteristic portrait of Springsteen as a live performer, capturing his first solo shows since his rise to fame, following two decades spent building his reputation as a tireless showman and charismatic bandleader
Alone on stage and unburdened by rockstar trappings (or “all the macho posturing that I have to do,” as he calls it) Springsteen sounds equally thrilled and uncomfortable. Throughout these sets, his songs are reframed as private, neurotic musings, so that even the audience’s presence begins to feel intrusive. “If you’re moved to clap along, please don’t,” he states at the beginning of the second set. “I’d appreciate as much quiet during the songs as possible.”
Accordingly, the overriding mood throughout The Christic Shows is almost oppressively introspective. Night one’s rendition of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” embodies neither the cathartic chug that propelled the 1978 studio rendition nor the frantic pulse of later solo versions. It’s a tentative performance, placed near the beginning of the set like Springsteen’s attempt to pump himself up. Conversely, the languid, dreamlike sprawl of 1982’s “Mansion on the Hill” is replaced here with a propulsive, nervous energy: perhaps the result of a narrator now faced with living in (and paying the mortgage for) his own mansion on a hill.
As on his finest albums, the sequencing is impeccable, highlighting and building upon particular themes across his discography: adjusting your beliefs in the face of disappointment, finding fulfillment within society, growin’ up. The setlist isn’t exactly a crowd-pleaser, favoring quieter album cuts over sing-along favorites, but Springsteen still slips in a few treats for the super-fans. The crowd roars when he mentions how “The big man joined the band” in “Tenth Avenue Freezeout,” a moment that feels as close as these shows come to pandering, given that Springsteen was currently doing everything in his power to distance himself from his mythical E Street origin story.
More subtle is the closing line of 1973’s seldom-performed “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” (“All aboard, Nebraska’s our next stop”), fading right into the murder ballad title track from Nebraska—a darkly humorous juxtaposition, given the songs’ jarring shift in tones. It’s the kind of playful pairing that Springsteen’s album-oriented E Street tours rarely made room for. Here, he seems delighted to pull from obscure corners of his discography and watch different characters interact, subversively toying with his canon in the process. It’s telling that he performs over half of Nebraska, but not “Dancing in the Dark,” “Badlands,” or “Born to Run.”
With most of the hits out of the picture, Springsteen has space to work through some new material, playing spirited renditions of songs that wouldn’t make the cut for his next album (“Red Headed Woman,” “When the Lights Go Out,”) and one that shouldn’t have (“57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)”). Other new songs, like “Soul Driver” and “Real World,” later found on 1992's often-derided Human Touch, are high points, offered here in their stripped-back, definitive versions. The latter performance is a reminder that in 1990, Springsteen was just coming into a new version of his voice—a sad, country croon, somewhere between the vocal-chord-shredding grit of Born in the U.S.A. and the rootsy twang seemingly bestowed upon him by the cowboy hat from the Ghost of Tom Joad era. Hearing these performances—especially with this crystal-clear remaster that brings the crisp, percussive shimmer of Springsteen’s guitar into focus—you can imagine the fans in attendance were confident that another studio masterpiece was on its way.
This was not the case. When Human Touch was released in spring of ’92 (along with its far-better sister album, Lucky Town), it was Springsteen’s worst-received release by a long shot. Unlike his defining works, Human Touch had little personality, trading in Bruce’s everyman for a decidedly generic “any man.” Like Weezer’s Green Album or the second season of “True Detective,” Human Touch found Springsteen hiding behind genre tropes and clichés, retreating in fear of having revealed too much. Most heartbreaking was what happened to songs like “Real World” and “Soul Driver,” as they were rendered unrecognizable by superfluous bells and whistles (technically a pan flute, but the less said about that the better). You almost wish someone would have convinced Springsteen to pull another Nebraska and just release these live performances instead and let the full-band studio versions exist only in our imaginations.
Maybe that’s what his enthusiastic audience was trying to express at these shows, as they repeatedly ignore Springsteen’s requests for silence and shout toward the stage. In one deeply revealing moment, within the first few songs, a fan yells “We love you!” as Bruce tunes his guitar. He sighs in response, calm and deliberate, as if he had been rehearsing for this moment, “But you don’t really know me.” It’s slightly shocking to hear Springsteen take an antagonistic turn toward his fans, but he had a point. Indeed, the 41-year-old, mulleted Californian in these recordings is a very different person than the scruffy romantic who summed up his mission statement in 1975, “I want to know if love is wild... I want to know if love is real.” Opening both shows with Tunnel of Love’s heartbroken centerpiece, “Brilliant Disguise,” Springsteen sings like a man with more adult concerns on his plate. He wants to know if love can last. He wants to know himself.
Accordingly, the following decade would find Springsteen eventually reuniting with the E Street Band and returning to New Jersey, where he and his second wife, bandmate Patti Scialfa, would raise a family. After spending his career searching for a happy ending—a way out, a promised land, a beautiful reward—he finally got one, and it dropped him back right where he started. Still, in its awkwardness and beauty, The Christic Shows is a fascinating portrait of the artist in a period of transition, raising questions that, in hindsight, he knew the answers to all along.
Tue Jun 28 05:00:00 GMT 2016