4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)

Asbury Park, New Jersey
Canon EOS Elan 7ne, Ilford Delta Professional 400

Sandy, the angels have lost our desire for us
I spoke to 'em just last night and they said they won't set themselves on fire for us anymore
Every summer when the weather gets hot they ride that road down from heaven on their Harleys they come and they go
And you can see 'em dressed like stars in all the cheap little seashore bars parked making love with their babies out on the Kokomo
Well the cops finally busted Madame Marie for tellin' fortunes better than they do
This boardwalk life for me is through
You know you ought to quit this scene too

Bruce Springsteen, 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy), on The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle (1973). 

Springsteen was once one of those personal heroes that I had as a kid and probably should not have.  I was fascinated, though: you mean a local boy like me could write and be famous?  By the time college came around, and I had exhausted my share of "Yeah, I see Bruce around town," stories, he came out with The Ghost of Tom Joad, Springsteen's incredibly sparse quasi-tribute to Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck.  With this album, with its incredibly well written songs - Springsteen's Straight Time is, without a doubt, my favorite song he has ever written, and Dry Lightning is as emotionally complex as anything written by Raymond Carver or Tobias Wolff - I was in awe. 

I picked up the newest album trying to hide my nervous excitement.  I had heard enough about Devils & Dust to know it was supposed to be a return to the Tom Joad sound.  I had thought The Rising was a blandly over-produced album that, even with its connection to 9-11, had no emotional pull for me.  Unfortunately, Devils & Dust also seems to lack power.  Perhaps, like The Ghost of Tom Joad, it will take me a year to finally appreciate this album, but I feel a sort of resentment to how the album was presented.  It's in this annoying DVD format (and only that format, as far as I can tell), which means that it cannot be played on my PC (and this is apparently part of some sort of intentional anti-piracy measure).  This means that I can't use my "good" speakers (my PC has Dolby 5.1 speakers and outclasses every stereo I own).  The songs... nothing's hit me yet.  There's no song that makes me feel gut-punched, like on The Ghost of Tom Joad.  There's still that slick sound of over-production, that far-too-clean sound that says the album was recorded in a multi-million dollar studio instead of on some low-fi 16 track recorder in a barn (like Nebraska, The River, or The Ghost of Tom Joad). 

It sounds like the sort of album that a member of my parents' generation would make at this age, the brief, final moments of just being an adult before one slides into one's sixties and enters a different period of life.  I can't say this is really an "age" thing, because I can pop Johnny Cash's American IV: The Man Comes Around into the stereo and hear a 70-year-old's fresh take on the raw American roots sound (and more to the point, I can hear one do a version of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt that has me gasping for breath by the end). 

For some reason, this really bothers me.  It's like finding out that Mickey Mantle - or whoever one could claim is his modern equivalent - used 'roids or beat his wife (okay, I guess that some have had to deal with this one already, at least if they were fans of Joe Dimaggio, the biggest fool in American history just by virtue of his cruelty to Marilyn Monroe). 

I want that thrill again. 

Comments

[pops]

Hang in there - Neil Diamond's gettin' all unplugged with Rick Rubin.

[Shabe]

A lot of Shore Springsteen afficiandoes have told me they don't like D&D, but I like it a lot. I give Springsteen a lot of credit for trying new things. He certainly does not have to.

[TPB, Esq.]

Pops: Maybe I need to dig out my old copy of Burt Bacharach's Painted From Memory.

Shabe: I don't know if the sound of D&D is new in relation to The Rising but I can definitely see how both albums are new directions in relation to Tunnel of Love and Ghost of Tom Joad.