Springsteen On Broadway

[DukeDeMondo]

This arrived on Netflix over the weekend. Springsteen On Broadway. Our man onstage alone telling his stories and playing his songs for two and a half holy hours. Dissecting his "magic tricks" and performing some new ones. Bidding ghosts rise up all about him.

Some of the stories that he tells have already been told, in his autobiography or in interviews or wherever else, but the telling here is utterly captivating regardless. And hugely moving, particularly when he gets to talking about his parents, which he does, over and over, throughout. His father, especially. He has it out with the auld boy in a whole bunch of his songs, but here he traces his entire act back to that distant, drunk, clinically depressed figure at the far side of the kitchen table, detailing the myriad of ways in which he has tried to inhabit him in his art, for that was the only way he had of connecting with him at all.

"Those whose love we wanted but didn't get, we emulate them," he says. I don't know how true that is or it isn't, but it certainly sounds like it's true for him. "So when I was a young man and looking for a voice to meld with mine, to sing my songs and to tell my stories, well, I chose my father's voice, because there was something sacred in it to me. And when I went looking for something to wear I put on a factory worker's clothes, because they were my dad's clothes."

The songs themselves are sometimes subject to melodic rewiring and reconfiguration, and sometimes they're not. The "Born In The USA" that he performs is the blusier, starker take on the material that he's been performing for years and which you can trace right back to the original demo, but this is something fucking else altogether, this howling, desperate Springsteen On Broadway rendition. There aren't any videos of it up on YouTube that I can find, but the accompanying album is up there, so you can hear it, at least, if you want.

"I've got NOwhere to GO!"


Anyway it's remarkable. Maybe you have to be a fan, I don't know. I am a fan and I thought it was extraordinary, but maybe if I wasn't I wouldn't.

It's on there anyway, now. This Springsteen On Broadway. Has anyone else watched it yet, or listened to it, or seen it live, or anything in this line?

[SteveDave]

I'm sorry to hear this isn't his showtunes LP. I would've loved to hear him do "Mr Mistoffelees" in his down-home gruff working class man manner.