Fever by Tim Riley

Author:Tim Riley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781466876569
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Walk Like a Man

Bruce Springsteen is Elvis Presley’s closest rock relative: the irreducible American rock icon, the giant talent who came out of nowhere (Freehold, New Jersey) to map a whole new world for men in rock. Along with being rock’s next great man, the next leap in its evolving ideas about manhood, he’s also the only American rock star worthy of comparison to the original Elvis, and the only one to take on gender themes with a writer’s zeal. Through his coming-of-age stories, shadowboxing an overbearing father whose class fatalism threatened his intoxicating boyhood ideals, Springsteen staged the soaring energy it takes to grapple with manhood in our era.

As his writing capacity grew, Springsteen self-consciously gathered and summarized all of rock history. And he bet everything he had on his live show, which was literally a way of life even after his third recording, Born to Run, hit big in 1975. Onstage, Springsteen became a living metaphor for how rock culture can help make sense of all the bewildering signals surrounding manhood. Part of this process was his evolution as bandleader: his E Street Band was comprised of old chums (guitarist Miami Steve Van Zandt, bassist Gary Tallent, organist Danny Federici) and Broadway pit pros (pianist Roy Bittan and drummer Max Weinberg, who replaced Ernest “Boom” Carter in 1974). Before he became a rock icon, Springsteen’s sprawling ambition consumed the singer, songwriter, guitarist, and bandleader in him, to the point where half the excitement of a given show was hearing perfectly competent musicians transcend themselves in order to keep up with their leader. His weaknesses were a prolific muse that led to wordiness, and production, where he regularly leaned on his longtime manager and former Rolling Stone editor, Jon Landau.

Springsteen gathered his pop forefathers around him deliberately: from Presley to Phil Spector, girl groups to Dylan, R&B covers to frat rock, his appetite for rock history was at least as big as his ambition. His marathon concerts, lasting upwards of four and half hours, demanded the physical stamina of Tina Turner (finally, a white guy to rival Tina) and earned him the nickname previously reserved for James Brown: “the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business.” He shuffled his song sets constantly, so that even if you were hearing familiar material, every night had a different emotional tone. And he loved pulling out surprises—unreleased material, oddball covers, new arrangements of songs everybody thought they knew. Through this ongoing process of re-creating his material night after night, he built an empire, and it was an empire of participation: at any given concert, audiences felt as though they were helping celebrate everything rock could be.

Drenched in sweat and sporting a grin that summed up and goaded the crowd’s rapture even further, Springsteen stretched out his original material way past expectations, then piled on the encores, diagrams of rock history that visited the Motor City (the Mitch Ryder medley with “Devil with a Blue Dress On”/“Good Golly Miss Molly”), Buddy Holly (“Rave On”

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