Wrecking Ball by Bruce Springsteen and The E. Street Band: The Shotgun Review by Russell Burlingame

Russell Burlingame is A Russ but not The Russ.  Russell joined some of us at Blog@, then Best Shots, then made his way here.  These days he does a lot for ComicBook.com and other sources.  And yes, he reviews music, too . . .
With the most overtly political album of his career, Bruce Springsteen returns in March with Wrecking Ball, his best LP since 1988's Tunnel of Love and a record that's as prescient now as was Born in the USA when it was released.

Born in the USA is, actually, an apt comparison in many ways. That record was Springsteen's first major foray into the realm of the political, and it was both musically and politically misunderstood by many. Like the title track “Born in the USA”, which was largely perceived as a jingoistic anthem and even briefly co-opted by then-President Ronald Reagan, Springsteen's first single of 2012--“We Take Care of Our Own,” which he and the E Street Band played at the Grammys—has an upbeat tempo and seemingly optimistic refrain that hide its skepticism. The apparent enthusiasm and boundless patriotism of "We Take Care of Our Own" is on display front and center, but the real question is whether that narrative—the idea that Americans come together and take care of the least among us—is really true in an era where the wealthiest 1% get hundreds of millions in tax breaks while as a society, we argue about how—or whether—to pay for a healthcare program to be sure the poor and infirm are cared for.

An eclectic album that blends Springsteen's signature rock sound with some of the folk, gospel and country influences he's picked up in recent years while playing with the Seeger Sessions Band as well as elements of Celtic rock, hip-hop and Woody Guthrie-esque protest, Wrecking Ball is a revelation for Springsteen, reinventing the artist whose last pair of studio records were good-but-not-great efforts that seemed to coast on the artistic and thematic largesse of his fan- and critical-favorite 2002 comeback record The Rising.



While both The Rising and his most recent previous album, Working on a Dream, played with a number of musical styles and genres, you'd have to go back to 1980's The River to find a Springsteen record with the same sense of playful and dutiful exploration as Wrecking Ball; from track to track, it's impossible to know what might come next. Springsteen, though, has always been one for whom the album is a full, individual work unto itself and Wrecking Ball doesn't miss a step. Even transitioning from a song backed by a sparse acoustic arrangement and into one with gospel singers, drum loops or a female rapper, the narrative of the record is unbroken, creating a very natural progression of the tracks even in spite of the jarring difference in styles.

Arguably the most difficult thing to do in all of popular music is to make an LP that holds up cover to cover. Great artists like Johnny Cash and Phil Ochs arguably never made a single studio LP that stacks up against the likes of London Calling or Blood on the Tracks, but this record does.

Springsteen fans at the Stone Pony London message board community, a notoriously negative lot who have mainly lambasted every record he's made in the past ten years, greeted an album leak late early this week with glowing reviews. “Easily his best piece of work since Tunnel of Love,” declared one fan who admitted his own apprehension about the album given a political difference with Springsteen. “Where has this genius been hiding?”

Wrecking Ball also has the discinction of being possibly the first Springsteen studio record to ever actually capture the energy and enthusiasm of his legendary live performances; for years, Springsteen's hardcore fans have fought against shoddy, overproduced radio mixes of songs like “Tunnel of Love” and “Glory Days” and tried to explain to their friends and the bootlegs are so much better, and that live, there's nothing like the E Street Band. Sadly, by the time someone finally found a way to catch that lightning in a bottle, there are some notable E Street absences in the form of recently-deceased organist Danny Federici (who also didn't appear on Working on a Dream) and sax player Clarence Clemons, Springsteen's onstage #2 man and the only member of the band (other than Springsteen himself) ever to be prominently featured on an album cover (the band's breakout hit Born To Run).

There's a kind of sonic bookending with Born to Run that happens on Wrecking Ball, and it may or may not be intention on Springsteen's part. The famous moaning refrain from the end of Born to Run's title track is echoed subtly as “Wrecking Ball”--the song—winds down. While Clemons was a member of the band in the pre-Born to Run days, that album featured “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” which many think of as the first major Clemons song to the Springsteen recorded canon and which features the lyric “They made that change uptown when the Big Man”--Springsteen's nickname for Clemons-- “joined the band.” “Wrecking Ball” is itself also a better use of the sports-as-a-metaphor-for-life motif than Springsteen's hit single “Glory Days,” which did the same thing almost three decades ago now.

Both the title track and “We Are Alive” can be seen as a response to the deaths of Danny and the Big Man. The latter more explicitly, especially as it connects to Springsteen's comments that "Clarence doesn't leave the E Street Band when he dies. He leaves when we all die."

As a longtime fan myself, I'm confident enough in my masculinity to admit that my eyes welled up and I got too choked up to talk for a few minutes after the first time I heard Clemons' sax solo on "Land of Hope and Dreams". That fan-favorite song had appeared on a live album ten years ago and had been a staple of concerts and compilation records ever since but, like “Wrecking Ball,” finally made the jump from live track to studio lick with this release. The solo is, as far as anyone knows, the final E Street track on which Clemons performed before his death in June.

Springsteen once described the hero of his song “Devils & Dust” as "a regular guy caught in the crosshairs of history," and there are a lot of those characters on this record. More than once (on “Death to My Hometown” and “Easy Money”), references are made to characters who “didn't hear a sound” when the financial crisis threw their life into chaos. White collar crime, he says, is just as damaging as the other variety, even if we perceive it differently. “Some men rob you with a gun, some with a fountain pen” is a paraphrase of lyrics used by Woody Guthrie, Pretty Boy Floyd and Bob Dylan over the years and it seems as though Springsteen is tapping into that mentality to drive home with the listener that just because nobody actually did physical harm, doesn't mean they aren't guilty of a crime. But, as he points out in “Death to My Hometown,” (which listens like the sonic equivalent of Michael Moore's breakout hit Roger & Me) those “robber barons” responsible for taking the global economy still haven't faced charges. That's a source of fury that Springsteen can share with activists of all stripes. He sings:

“The greedy thieves who came around, and ate the flesh of everything they found, whose crimes have gone unpunished now, walk the streets as free men now—they brought death to our hometown.” That verse is punctuated with gunfire, something Springsteen's never used in his music before but which would seem at home with the Dropkick Murphys, with whom Springsteen recorded a track last year and whose influence can be felt strongly throughout that track. Other tracks enjoy not just the influence of but the musical contributions of former Pearl Jam drummer Matt Chamberlain and Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello.

There's an element of the spiritual at play, too, in this record. Springsteen pleads with his flock to save the faithful from the rising tides of a crisis brought on by the greed and destructive lust for power of the 1%. "Jesus said the money changers in this temple will not stand," sings Springsteen in "Rocky Ground." To the Boss, America has always been The Promised Land and the way the worst and most powerful among us have tainted that hallowed ground has to be painful to watch.

The importance of this record, at this moment in history, from an artist like Springsteen, cannot be overstated. His personal best work in nearly 25 years, the album hooks into the zeitgeist of the “Occupy” movement which was in its putative stages as Springsteen finished the record and radically broadens his own musical borders. This is his own personal American Idiot, a shot across the bow to both the musical and political establishment that reminds those of us who may have forgotten that Springsteen is an artistic force to be reckoned with.