The Realest Bruce We’ve Ever Heard
His must-see biographical stage show makes for a uniquely powerful concert album
Springsteen’s must-see biographical stage show makes for a uniquely powerful concert album.
As recording artists grapple with the low-yield streaming era, there’s been a surge of creativity off record — in pumped-up concert staging, film scoring, memoir writing, Twitter feeds. Flexing the storytelling skills he’s flaunted in songs and concert banter for decades, Bruce Springsteen rose to the moment with his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, and the subsequent Springsteen on Broadway, his (mostly) one-man meta-jukebox-musical, which just ended its year-plus New York run. Now both a Netflix film and a two-and-a-halfhour soundtrack LP, it’s a model of modern multiplatform art-making.
The LP was recorded, like the film, in front of an audience at the Walter Kerr Theatre, as a precise replica of the stage show, in turn based closely on the book: Its foreword, rejiggered, is the opening monologue; segments of the narrative in the show mirror chapters from Born to Run. The result is by turns audiobook, podcast and live album, and at its most potent when it becomes a hybrid of the three.
It does this straightaway with “Growing
Up,” the abstracted coming-of-age tale from Springsteen’s 1973 debut, here a 12-minute sprawl of talking blues, cabaret spiel, pulpit pounding and stand-up. He sings two verses, then veers into an account of his rock & roll conversion and success as a seven-year-old Elvis Presley mime, with well-honed dramatic pauses, while fingerpicking the looped melody on his acoustic. Then he veers into the next verse. Rather than thwarting the song’s momentum, he transforms it, stories and song building off one another. He does it again, to devastating effect, on “My Father’s House” — blowing harmonica, singing with trembling gravity, then recounting a dream of watching himself perform onstage for thousands of people while crouched beside his dad. Springsteen touches his arm and says, “That guy onstage — that’s how I see you.”
Eventually things settle into an acoustic Bruce show, like those on the 1995-97 Ghost of Tom Joad tour, set list optimized toward the autobiographical. Springsteen on Broadway reprises that tour’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” reframing it with 12-string acoustic as a bottleneck blues, part Lead Belly, part Fred McDowell, and reclaiming its protest-song birthright. He also revisits “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” with a speech decrying people “in the highest offices of our land” who “want to destroy the idea of an America for all.”
The heart of Springsteen on Broadway isn’t politics, however. It’s family, love, the struggle to escape your roots and own them. Springsteen recites the Lord’s Prayer — seared into his memory through his Catholic upbringing — and ends the show with his own prayer: “Born to Run.” He caps it with the sound of a heartbeat, tapping it out with his hand on the body of his acoustic guitar, until it falls silent.
The understated moment is a nice metaphor for his life’s work, beautifully encapsulated here, and yet not over.