Word: springsteen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...something to be proud of," says Ron Weisen, whose United Steelworkers of America Local 1397 in Homestead, Pa., was one of the first organizations to receive a Springsteen contribution, almost a year ago. "He worries about the underfed and the underprivileged." Says Robert Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America: "We would not exist if it were not for Bruce Springsteen." Back in 1981, when, as Muller says, "nobody wanted to hear about the Viet Nam War," a Springsteen concert raised about $100,000 for the V.V.A. "That was the beginning of Bruce's political involvement," Muller thinks...
Well, in the words of old Buddy Holiday, that'll be the day. Springsteen is a superstar, but he is also bent on being a populist, marrying the mythic dimensions of major celebrity to the kind of moral and social responsibility seldom found bobbing in the musical mainstream. "He's closer to his public image than any of the other rock stars I've known," says his friend and biographer Dave Marsh. "It's hard to accept, but the guy is all there in his music." Backstage at a concert, the atmosphere is a little more restrictive, less familial than...
There may be a variety of musical reasons for the current Springsteen ascendancy. The new songs are sharper, neater, more carefully formed than in the past. His voice is clearer, and it is brought further up front in the recording mix. On his rock videos, he shows enough charisma to burn out the entire Brat Pack, while fueling endless idle speculation about a future in Hollywood. In a half-decade full of switchback curves and turning points, however, the starting line may have been a moment when Springsteen opened Joe Klein's luminous 1980 biography of Woody Guthrie. Nebraska...
...high points of the current concert tour is Springsteen's heartbroken guitar-and-harmonica version of what he calls "the best song ever written about the promise of America, This Land Is Your Land. It's a promise," he adds, "that's eroding every day for a lot of people. Countries are like people. It's easy to let the best of yourself slip away...
Huge as they are now, Springsteen's concerts remain full-throttle performances that depend on intensity, not special effects, to reach the back rows. Scramble up to the farthest seats, look down toward the field. Springsteen, on the bright, distant stage, looks as if he were singing in the engine room of the Close Encounters spaceship. But the sound is buoyant, even this high, enhanced by people all around, dancing, singing along. You can just about see Bruce below, but you can hear him everywhere, and, even at this distance, you recognize him. He is the promise that...