Sharon’s Back. To Campaign for the Boss

Sharon Gerber returns for one last swing. This one is for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

Describing something as esoteric as a live performance can be difficult, but I’ll try.  It’s not just technical proficiency, because you have that in hundreds of hobby bar bands wherever you go that get ignored in favor of conversation.  And it’s not just energy, because lots of shitty bands have that and nothing else. It’s more than just a combination of the two.  There’s something that needs to happen on top of that – something that makes you shush your friends, put down your beer, and turn towards the stage.  And more than that, it makes you walk up to the merch table to buy an album, or to at least find out where they’ll be next.   It might be a hearty drumbeat or bass that makes you tap in unison.  It might be a roaring sax solo that whips your head around.  It could be the roar of a guitar solo, or even still, the roar of a lead singer that will not let your attention out of his control.  If he gets it for even a second, he’s going to hold it forever.

People slag off the frontman as being a glory hog. For stealing the spotlight, and taking all of the credit.  What they forget, is that when you’re out in the battleground of the live show, the frontman is on the front line. He’s at war with the audience, fighting their apathy.  He’s going to war with them to win them to the side of this band he has at his back – this band he knows is incredible, is all-star, is full of super-heroes.   He knows his drummer is a mighty madman.  That the bass player is the only one that can rein him in.  The keyboard AND the piano are going to come together from opposite sides in a cacophony to wake you up, and guitars that are going to make your pulse race, and most importantly, a saxophone that’s going to make you drop to your knees and worship.  But he’s on the line to sing and yell and tell stories and sweat blood – anything that will get you to the part where you care enough for him to introduce the band.  It doesn’t matter if they’re playing a tiny bar on the boardwalk or a 60,000 person stadium – he’s going to reach every person in that place, and make sure that every one leaves devoted.  It doesn’t matter if they walked in die-hard or went along with friends because there was nothing else to do.  He’s going to reach you.  Especially if that man is named Bruce Springsteen, and the band he’s fronting just happens to be the E Street Band.

The word longevity is one that gets bandied around quite a bit.  It seems like every band that manages to make it past two albums gets to discuss the topic, which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so exasperating.  Bands with true longevity, who have not only survived but thrived through the years.  It seems almost impossible to fathom that after thirty something years in the business of rock n roll, a band would be coming off one of their most successful tours ever.  And that’s where we have Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band.

Seth already introduced you to the key players in his write-up of this incredible supergroup.  Each member could have (and in some cases have) led their own successful band.  Much like the Avengers, however, the whole is so much more powerful when they work together (and they count a rather kick-ass redhead amongst their number).   And though they’ve been through many, many amazing iterations, there’s really nothing quite like the core of the E Street Band as we’ve come to know them.  Because they’re such an amazing collection of instrumentalists and creative forces that are barely contained, and that force comes alive when they play live.  There isn’t a force they couldn’t battle and win.

It may be hard to believe that a band that’s been part of some genuinely amazing albums (Born to Run.  Born in the USA.  The River.) is actually better than on the record, but it’s true.  There aren’t many bands that manage to create their own energy in addition to feeding off what is coming out of the crowd, but that’s what E street manages to be.  It’s an old story, but one we seem to hear out of a few successful bands.  The studio albums weren’t doing well at all before Born to Run, not at all.  But it was the live shows that built the mystique, got the notice.  The live act is what made Clarence Clemmons walk into a bar during a hurricane and ask to join the band.  (True story).

There is something in their live show that they’ve tried to get on record, sometimes with success, is the sheer power of the joy that comes across when they play together.  Even in the saddest of songs (and what’s sadder than when the Rat’s own dream guns him down?) has a moment of transcendence that comes from the band itself, not the vocal – like a saxophone solo that lifts your heart into the rafters, the piano that holds you when you hear the exclamation that I hated him, and I hated you, when you went away, or a crash of piano and guitar that confirms that yes, yes we were born to run.  No lyric, no matter how good, would take off and wedge itself into our imagination without the sheer magic of a band that’s better than the sum of its parts.