San Francisco Chronicle, 4/11/2003: "Rising" under the shadow of war (Sacramento review)

Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 07:45:36 -0700
Newsgroups: rec.music.artists.springsteen
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Found at:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/04/11/DD203732.DTL
(includes one photo from show)
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'Rising' under the shadow of war
Springsteen's Sacramento show in tune with uncertainty of times
Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts, Culture Critic Friday, April 11, 2003
Sacramento -- It felt like a pilgrimage, to a destination unknown.
Hearing Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band in Sacramento on
Wednesday night, the day that Saddam Hussein's statue toppled into a
fragile new world in the making, had a strange, ambiguous potency.
Familiar songs, lines, even Springsteen's famously tortured face
seemed full of twisting, shifting new meanings.
If the audience came to Arco Arena for some triumphal catharsis, it
got an evening far more faceted than that. Wariness and joy, regret
and determination were layered tightly together through the pounding
anthems, driving blues, somber reflections and gospel exaltation.
One way or another, by earnest intention or the chiseled compression
of his work, Springsteen is a perpetual, protean artist of the moment.
That seemed freshly apparent Wednesday.
Eleven of the 24 songs on the Sacramento set list came from "The
Rising," the artist's album-length response to the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks. In one way, inevitably, his World Trade Center urgency felt
eclipsed by the recent warfare and new world order in Iraq. In another
sense, the song's impetus was folded into a broader global summons to
"come on up."
Springsteen and the band didn't oversell the title song Wednesday.
They didn't need to. As the light slowly dawned on the singer's face,
the song's imagery bloomed open with an ominous beauty. "Sky of
blackness and sorrow . . .
Sky of mercy, sky of fear."
The band fired off a few chords and bolted into "Lonesome Day." The
transition tightened the melodic and thematic links between those two
songs. Here, somehow, was a second attempt to see a way forward from a
war's long shadow.
Clarence Clemons' soaring, jolting sax line pierced the crowd open.
For a few minutes, anyway, the world felt healed and whole. "It's all
right," Springsteen sang, over and over. His fans affirmed it in a
choral callback: "Yeah!"
Older numbers, like a darkly shaded acoustic version of his 1984 "Born
in the U.S.A.," held the ripple of our own deeply troubled times. So
did "My City of Ruins," a paean and prayer for his Asbury Park, N.J.,
hometown that couldn't help summoning to mind Baghdad -- and Kabul and
New York and our wider collective damage.
BRIEF COMMENTS ON WAR
Springsteen had little to say, overtly, about the war in Iraq. It was
almost 11 o'clock before he expressed a brief wish that both the
soldiers and Iraqi citizens might find safety. Far more eloquent was
the sudden hushed pause he inserted around a line in the chorus of "No
Surrender" -- "There's a war outside still raging."
Things landed unpredictably through the evening. "May your strength
give us strength. May your faith give us faith": Somehow those pleas
from the recent "Into the Fire" felt tentative and provisional. A
lyric from "The Promised Land" (1978), by some alchemical
transformation, seemed freshly, shiningly alive:
"If I could take one moment into my hands/ Mister, I ain't a boy, no
I'm a man/ And I believe in a promised land."
Springsteen launched that number with a huffing harmonica riff. Roy
Bittan ramped things up with clamorous double octaves on the piano.
Then Clemons added his jubilant elixir of melody. Springsteen borrowed
the melody back again, marched it down to the front of the stage and
showered it straight down from his guitar into a sea of waving hands.
To fans both devoted and casual, Springsteen is a creator of ecstatic
connection. There was a palpable craving for it at the Arco concert.
Summoned to a raucous call-and-response party at "Mary's Place,"
shushed to quiet attention for the meandering vocal harmonies in
"Empty Sky" or stretching every arm at the stage in "Land of Hope and
Dreams," his audience viscerally yearned, as the lyric goes, to "take
what we can carry" along with Springsteen.
There are any number of ways to understand that. Springsteen is a
genuinely transcendent musical artist. His message, at age 53, is
perfectly attuned to the fraying but persistent ardor of Baby Boomers.
He's a gifted showman who can both orchestrate a crowd (and the
commercial marketplace) and remain sincere in doing it.
In the moment, with an arena full of fans bathed in white light and
pulsing to the music, it doesn't matter why it happens. From the
tangles of grief, desolation and doubt he portrays, Springsteen kept
pulling everyone together toward the light. "Come on, rise up! Come
on, rise up! Come on, rise up!" The singer's raw stretched voice and
grimaces rode an implicit undertow: This will be exhausting,
soul-draining work, for me, for us, for the world.
THE MUSIC MAKES SENSE
Yes, the chords can ring out with blaring decisiveness. The lyrics can
declaim baldly. There are also lingering deep shadows in Springsteen's
music --
a recurring burr of dissonance in "Empty Sky," the telegraphic enigma
of "You're Missing" ("Everything is everything," goes one haunting
hinge in that song), the steady keyboard pulse in "She's the One" that
gets blown away in a rhythmically irregular deluge.
Someone tossed Springsteen a white cowboy hat near the end. Someone
else broke out an American flag. Symbols are everywhere right now and
simply too complicated to figure out. Music makes its own
explanations. "Sha la la," went the final ringing chorus of the night.
"Sha la la la la la."
E-mail Steven Winn at swinn@sf chronicle.com.
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