Word: springsteens
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...Live/1975-85 is structured, with occasional exceptions, in chronological order, and, in its tape and CD configurations, each of the three parts is like a self-contained concert, so it is not necessary to play the whole set straight through to pick up the momentum or feel the impact. But Springsteen is after more than just putting together a family album, a memoir of glory days. Live/1975-85 is the personal testament of a decade...
Whoever did not catch on to Springsteen until 1984's commercial breakthrough, Born in the U.S.A., which sold some 17 million copies worldwide and became Columbia's all-time hit album, can now take Live/1975-85 and play an extraordinarily exciting game of catch-up. 4th of July, Asbury Park, which dates back to the "Boss's" second album, released in 1973, has never sounded more poignant or evocative of all its epiphanies down on the Kokomo than it does here, in a performance recorded at a New Year's Eve concert in New York City six years ago. Springsteen fans...
...years they have been following me around California, trying to get me to come home"). The River, however, begins with much darker currents, a memory of how "me and my Dad used to go at it all the time, over almost anything." He recalls how his father waited until Springsteen was laid up in bed after a motorcycle accident, then brought in someone to cut his son's long hair. Bruce said he would never forget it. His father said he couldn't wait until the Army got him. Later, the singer remembers, he came home after failing his draft...
...Where you been?" his father wanted to know. Bruce told him, and his father said, "What happened?" "They didn't take me." And his father heard that and said simply, "That's good." A story like that shows where seminal Springsteen songs like Adam Raised a Cain -- heard here in a rubbed-raw 1978 performance -- may have come from. On this record, it is also a psychic peacemaking. By the time the whole set ends with Tom Waits' Jersey Girl, a song to which Springsteen has added his own long last verse, there is a sense that accounts have been...
That is what makes Live/1975-85 unique: it is a concert as well as a confessional. Springsteen makes everyone accomplices in the shared experience of a common emotional life. And, as the cheers fade after the last song, there is a sure sense that it is time for him to move on. This is traveling music, then, for a trip that has finished and a journey that is about to begin. Put on Live/1975-85 and start waiting again...