Prove it all night
By Ted Cox
Daily Herald TV/Radio Columnist
There is a moment during the song "Prove it all Night" on Bruce Springsteen's HBO special when he and "Miami" Steve Van Zandt are trading call-and-response vocals. They dissolve back and forth in the camera frame, with Springsteen on the left side and Van Zandt on the right - until suddenly Van Zandt walks into the same camera shot as Springsteen and starts singing at the same microphone.
That is a visual metaphor for one of the main points of "Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band": unity among individuals, from many musicians one coherent sound. In fact, I think the TV special, which debuts at 8 p.m. Saturday on the premium-cable channel, does a better job of communicating that point than Springsteen and the E Street Band did in their Chicago appearances some 18 months ago.
Don't get me wrong: The music from Springsteen's comeback tour with the E Street Band was impressive. But what the performances lacked was context, a reason for being.
Almost 10 years after disbanding the E Streeters and going his own way, Springsteen simply decided to get "the band" back together, like Jake and Elwood Blues, and everybody was just OK with that? Sorry, but it didn't wash with me. I wanted some overt acknowledgement on Springsteen's part about why he was back with the group everybody else knew was best suited to his music all along. Springsteen's show in Chicago - the one I saw at the United Center, anyway - struck me as a family reun-ion in which an air of formality was preserved. Oh, everybody was glad to see one another, to be sure, but there were some topics that were not to be discussed and, in fact, were to be avoided at all times.
Much of that air of formality is preserved in the HBO special, but with a camera guiding a viewer's eyes to the fine details it makes its own points about the togetherness of these musicians. Time and again, the camera focuses tightly on Springsteen, with his hammy forearms, or Van Zandt, with his ringed fingers, or Nils Lof-gren, with his thumb-strumming style, as they create interlocking guitar parts. Patti Scialfa sings in counterpoint, Garry Tallent walks his bass, Clarence Clemons taps a percussion instrument and behind them all "Mighty" Max Weinberg keeps pounding away.
When the special goes to a camera tracking from side to side behind Weinberg at the back of the stage, showing the band as it looks out at the crowd in one smoothly flowing shot, it makes its own point about what a cohesive unit this is - still one of the great rock bands, as it was back in the '70s and '80s.
Jonathan Demme once got the same unified effect from tight close-ups and astute editing when he did the video for New Order's "Perfect Kiss." But that was a three-minute video, while this is a two-hour TV special. So it meanders a bit in the second half, as might be expected, but for the most part it concentrates on the interplay of the musicians and avoids rock-show cliches like crowd shots. This is about the band and its music.
The music is mostly very, very good. The special was shot during a triumphant 10-show run at New York City's Madison Square Garden at the end of the long 1999-2000 tour, and by that time the performances had been honed to a fine point.
"Atlantic City," a loner's song in the studio, becomes a hymn to group endurance as Springsteen pounds away at the strings of his guitar, while Van Zandt plays a mandolin as if he were hiding behind a door with a weapon, in character from his role in "The Sopranos." And the countrified "Mansion on the Hill," with Lofgren on pedal steel, is transcendent, finish-ing with Springsteen and Scialfa trading off beautiful connubial yodeling.
After that, things unravel a bit. "The River" is not as good here as it is in "No Nukes." "Badlands" and "Out in the Street" turn into a mutual-admiration society with the crowd. And "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" descends into a tiresome evangelist rant as Springsteen introduces the band.
Back in the '70s, Springsteen's concerts were like rock 'n' roll revival meetings, in that they renewed the audience's faith in rock 'n' roll. To mock evangelists specifically, even in fun, ruins the joke by making it overly obvious.
But Springsteen and the band get back on track with a solid if de rigeur "Born to Run" before tying up the show in a tidy package - and then puncturing that feeling of easy enjoyment.
It was an odd array of songs Springsteen played on this tour. It wasn't really a greatest-hits package, but instead a collection of audience faves and songs Springsteen and the band clearly like to perform. Most were songs of anguished, purposeless, if self-aware motion, from "Atlantic City" to "Youngstown" and from "Badlands" to "Out in the Street" to "Born to Run."
The closing "Land of Hope and Dreams" suggests a destination, an arrival where everyone is accepted and left to run as free as Van Zandt's galloping mandolin. But after that comes the encore "American Skin," Springsteen's song for a kid shot dead by New York City cops, with its haunting refrain, repeated over and over, "41 shots."
In that, Springsteen remains true to his entire career. He has never settled for easy answers, and never done the obvious - not even when it meant going 10 years without the E Street Band. "American Skin" suggests that, even with all the greatness the E Street Band recaptures here, in its first TV performance, it might still have new and daring places to go. "Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band" isn't just a feel-good TV special. It makes a viewer think - about the relationships between Springsteen and the band, and between the band and its music. That music remains as powerful as ever.
Ted Cox's column runs Tuesday and Thursday in Suburban Living, Friday in sports and Friday in Time out!
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