BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND THE ANTICON-ALL STARS ON ONE MEMORABLE NIGHT

Yesterday was a big night for me. The plan was to see two landmarks of US-American music on the same night. One being a veritable superstar, and rightfully so, the other the most progressive strand of underground-music around today. Actually, it was a coincidence that on the 25^th of June 2003 both Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street-Band and the Anticon-rooster containing Sole, Sage Francis and Themselves played at the same night, but it was also an opportunity to experience two unique acts, or even better: events, so much on contrary ends of a cultural spectrum (but not contradicting ends, I might say) in such a short span of time. This is how it went.

by Georg Cracked

I had a dream of seeing Bruce Springsteen play live ever since I became a fan[1], which was in my early teenhood and after “Born in the USA” and “Born to run” I put the live-5Lp-Box on my wishlist for christmas. If you have read up on this website a little, you might have stumbled over Bruce Springsteen quite some time here (review of “The Rising”) and there (a best-record of all time review of “Nebraska) so you’ll know that I’d break a lance for the Boss at any time. Unfortunately, I never had the chance to see the man play live. I missed the opportunity to see him solo with only the acoustic guitar, when he came to Vienna, but I have a nice story of how he almost broke a toe of an office-colleague of mine when he was working out in the same gym in Vienna. This time it had to be for real.

Sure enough I had heard a lot about Springsteens multi-hour-concerts and how he is able to bring a whole stadium to life. I hate stadium-shows, actually. I have been to a few in my time and I never got to much off them. The last time I had been to a stadium was when a friend of mine won tickets to Limp Bizkit and I saw a perfect rock-show with lots of gimmicks and light-show-stuff there, including a fire-work. It was really loud, so it was okay. Bruce Springsteen had no fabulous light-show, because the first hour of the concert it was still light outside (this being an open-air). And it was a perfect rock-show. Plus, it was a lot of fun, a lot of energy, a lot of mass-induced good feelings with the old man rocking and reeling across the large stage like a marathon runner, the band up to top notch (well, they are great musicians). It was real and honest American rock-music, made for stadiums, played for a stadium filled with people and the people responded as if Bruce Springsteen was singing to each one of them individually. And maybe he was.

Some of you might think, that I sound a little pathetic there, a little too dramatizing, but we were located a good 100 meters away from the stage, Bruce Springsteen was as large as the top-digit of my thumb from where I saw him, but when I looked around during songs like “Bobby Jean” or “Glory Days” everyone around me was cheering, singing along and jumping up and down. There was so much movement and good folks cheering, I had never seen at a punkrock-concert. Now imagine, what happened during “Born to run” ! The stadium went nuts, the whole big building was reverberating with people singing “tramps like us, Baby we were born to run”. Sure enough, Springsteen knows all the tricks to get the audience go wild, making them scream louder and louder for another encore, but it didn’t come off as blunt or arrogant, he definitely seemed to enjoy himself up there. Yeah, sometimes I wonder, if all the enthusiasm, the “we love Vienna” and the joy up on stage are for real, but then I think to myself: first, playing these songs is definitely fun no matter in which city you are tonight and with a repertoire of a few hundred great songs there is really no danger of falling into the trap of repeating yourself too often. Moreover, this is a band that has been playing together for over 25 years now, so they know a lot of songs and they can do an outstretched version of a simple rocker such as “Ramrod” and it’ll take them a long way. Second, if this night was a bad night for Bruce Springsteen, then I really want to see a good night.  

Three hours later we were all sweat right through, with aching hands and shoulders from the overhead clapping and sore throats from singing along. Can you imagine that? Yours truly, jumping up and down shouting his heart out to Ol’ Bruce? It happened, and I am happy it did. What a lot of people haven’t really understood, because they never bothered to try, is that Bruce Springsteen is a really good musician, a hard-worker as a songwriter and he knows exactly what he is doing and enjoys every minute of it. Musician, you ask? Well, maybe his guitar-playing is average and his rough voice might be issue of a taste-discussion, but where he really starts to shine is playing the harmonica. This is where he really excels as a musician. A songwriter, you ask, with his stupid little songs? Not true. His songs might sound simple, but they really aren’t. Even the simplest rocker like “Glory days” has various parts, melody lines that fall into each other. But my favourite evidence is “Thunder Road”, a song that has about seven different parts of chord-changes, three dynamic changes where the melodies get stopped and turn around with the atmosphere of the song and no refrain. Nevertheless half of the stadium sang through the whole of the song, because it is so masterfully crafted. “Thunder Road” really feels simple, but try to play along on your instrument and you’ll see what I mean.

Bruce Springsteen has a personal work ethic where he writes at least one song each week, and I admire that. Because it leaves him with over 50 songs a year to chose from. Other bands walk into the studio and hack out whatever comes to their minds. Which is my third argument: the man knows what he wants to do most and he does it. The American dream come true? Well, sort of.  

At a quarter past eleven we left the stadium, all exhausted, dried up, walking through the trash people left behind, still crowded in all the people trying to get home on public transfers. Well, not me. I still had plans for the evening, and though I was just as exhausted, I figured, hell it is late already, but a cool beer will be exactly what I need. So I drove through the city until I reached a little club called B72 about an hour later, where I learned that Sage Francis and Sole were already done. Fuck, but that is the way it goes. You can’t dance on two weddings at the same time, but you can still try, can’t you?.

Yesternight I was still so hyped up from the Springsteen-Experience that I really couldn’t set my mind to progressive, warped and intellectually demanding hip-hop[2]. Nevertheless, themselves were great, funny, clever, bouncing fat beats off the walls of the small club to make people dance, then intersperse those beats for a few bars with strange noises and synthie-sounds. And the long ranting raps about how fucked up things are today came of original and well-rehearsed at the same time. Hard workers those as well, I guess, because they knew their strange beats by heart, sometimes bobbing along behind their synthie-racks to just a few crackling noises and hi-hat-beats.

The best thing at the life show was the rants between the songs[3] where they complained that Eminem stole their Grammy and the kids didn’t even notice. Such is the wit and humour of themselves that the vocalist introduced them as “we are the Temptations, my name is Lawrence Fishburn” and only a few people got the joke because he was so serious and in the manner of how these things are usually said, that it wasn’t noticed right away. A great show indeed.   As Constantin told me, the show turned out well also, which is good, because it is always good, when people doing great, new things, boldly staring into the face of mainstream-music, are being rewarded for it, at least a little. With a genre like Hip-Hop, if you stare into the face of the mainstream, you’ll get a hundred gangster-rappers staring back and a few million people in the audience who want gold-chains, football-jerseys, bouncing butts and the same rhythms and rapped-verse / sung-chorus-structure over and over again. It is very much like going up to Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z, Nelly or whoever and tell them that they have become their very own caricature, a puppet-dog for the music industry to be pimped. Of course, they will point to their big houses and half a dozen luxury cars and ask “who is pimping who?”, suspecting that the answer stays the same, that they are just well-fed, luxury puppet dogs, so they get angry. I have been told, that people get angry at Anticon-artists, their non-machoism, their intellectualism and their pushing of musical boundaries, but also because they are more in sync with the origins of hip hop than their mainstream-counterparts.

Back to the evening. People tell me that Sage Francis was really good as well, so I kick myself in the head for showing up so late. Then people tell me that they were all good, so I bore them to death with specifying how good Bruce Springsteen was. What a night. Definitely one to remember. I fell asleep at home at 3.00 am, happy about the events of the day and the fact, that the next day was still a work-free day.