Springsteen: "The River" (Stereo Review, January 1981)

From my forthcoming -- end of the year -- book of my collected greatest literary hits...

...(specifically the Springsteen chapter), please enjoy my review of Bruce's first multi-lp set "The River."

The River comes at a crucial juncture in Bruce Springsteen's career. Now indisputably -- in terms of both public perception and critical acclaim -- the pre-eminent American rocker of his generation, Springsteen carries the weight of twenty-five years of dreams and history on his skinny shoulders, and the question is, will he stumble? And so The River is an Event, in the media sense, and the pressure for it to be a masterwork is heightened almost beyond any reasonable possibility. On the one hand, it has to be a significant stylistic breakthrough or its author trivializes all he's accomplished up to now; on the other, it has to be nothing less than the summation of everything vital and important rock itself has ever meant or represented.

This is clearly an impossible task, and it therefore takes nothing away from Springsteen's considerable accomplishment to say that The River falls short in some areas. In its claustrophobic, obsessive way, it is a remarkable album, light years beyond the reach of all but a handful of mainstream rockers. But it is certainly not the definitive statement it sets out to be, and it is not, overall, even its creator's best work, although its finest moments, at least, are worthy of comparison with his earlier peaks.

In a purely technical sense the album can hardly be faulted. While the basic instrumental approach remains recognizable (over-familiar or not), the sound of the E Street Band, with its echoes of middle Dylan, Van Morrison, and urban r-&-b, is still one of the most compelling noises in rock-and-roll, but there is a pronounced Sixties English flavor to the arrangements and production here, and the combination works. "The Ties That Bind," for example, is a great trebly roar of jangly guitars, and the hard rockers in particular have a metallic punch that none of Springsteen's earlier efforts have really approached. What does it is not the Spectorish Wall of Sound of the guitar songs on "Born to Run" but something a bit more down to earth: gloriously raucous frat-party music out of a roadhouse Texas Farfisa band. Overall, the instrumental layering and the extremely compressed dynamic range here remind me more than a little of Nick Lowe's revisionist work on Elvis Costello's Armed Forces. There's an edgy drive to the sound of the album that serves the tunes and the performances well and also gives the proceedings an ambiance that is both timeless and modern.

Of course, as my colleague Noel Coppage is rightly fond of pointing out, production is not music, and when we get to the songs on The River there are some inescapable, unpleasant conclusions to be drawn. The biggest should have been obvious after Darkness on the Edge of Town; on records, at least, the element of surprise has gone out of Springsteen's music. Onstage this has yet to happen (it's one of the reasons his live show remains the most electrifying in rock history), but in his records he's now dealing strictly in secondhand goods. One can't explain this any more by saying that he's a genre writer; fact is, there's not a melody here that isn't in some way recycled, and the stories, for the most part, are not so much overfamiliar as uninteresting. It's a question of focus; Springsteen has narrowed his vision to the point that all the larger-than-life quality has gone out of his work. The song "Jungleland," from Born to Run, for example, dealt with a particular urban landscape, but the treatment had an idealized, generalized romanticism that was cinematic, literary, or operatic, depending on how you wanted to look at it. The new songs on The River, with their detailed depictions of coming of age on the street, are more like journalism, and Springsteen is simply not a good enough reporter to give us the fresh insight that might make the songs and characters come alive, that would make us care about them.

There has been a similar decline musically. What made Springsteen's early songs hit so hard was his flair for melody and structural surprise, his uncanny ear for the sound and spirit of our collective jukebox past. His tunes were wildly unpredictable, crammed to overflowing with glorious hooks and half-remembered fragments of sublime old songs, a dazzling patchwork of rock, soul, folk, jazz, and honky tonk that was tender, vulgar, majestic, and sleazy all at once. A Springsteen album used to be a daring tight rope act. For The River, however, he used a net: many of the songs are deliberately monochromatic and predictable; two verses into them and you've heard all you need to hear. There's no sense of urgency -- they don't go anywhere.

With all that said, the odd thing is that The River still packs quite a wallop. There are, of course, some unfettered delights strewn among the twenty songs in the package; Springsteen may be playing down his pop gifts, but he hasn't deserted them altogether. The single, "Hungry Heart," for example, is an addictive, affectionate tribute to Jackson Browne (if you can imitate me, Bruce seems to be saying, I can return the favor), and several of the rockers, which don't aspire to be more than funny, good-natured swaggerers, are simply wonderful. It's hard to resist the energy and humor in "Sherry Darling," "Cadillac Ranch," "Two Hearts," and, especially, "I'm a Rocker." Then there are a few songs with grander ambitions that rise above the various weaknesses I've detailed. "Independence Day" is as moving an account of a father-son relationship as you're ever likely to encounter, and "Point Blank" and the title song are both, in their rather different ways, top-drawer Springsteen: taut, insinuating, compassionate. But the best things here, the album's centerpieces, together have a cumulative effect all out of proportion to their merits as individual songs, and the reason is that, whatever his failures of imagination in writing them, Springsteen still believes every single word he sings. In the end, the sincerity and heart he projects disarm criticism. In anyone else's hands a song like "Drive All Night" would be a disaster: mawkish, bloated, even faintly ridiculous. Here, however, it gets the kind of performance that makes one forgive Springsteen almost anything, such a tour de force of passion and drama and love that it seems superhuman. When people who've seen him perform talk about his being a "soul singer" in the old sense, this is the kind of thing they mean, and it's good finally to have it on record. If for nothing more than this one transcendent moment, "The River" has to be judged at least a qualified success.

The question, of course, is how long Springsteen can continue his Poet of the Lower Classes act without degenerating into overripe self-parody. If his working habits remain constant, the answer should be forthcoming sometime around September 1982. I, for one, am willing to wait.

Pretty good review, I think, and it holds up.

I should add that the thing that tickles me about it the most is that I got the release date for Springsteen's next album -- Nebraska -- pretty much right.