Interactive Lightning Round Poll: Loved Songs

You have touched on the matter very well.

Springsteen plays heartland rock / folk and blues. His songs are conventional (even if they constitute a synthesis, a very composite mixture of black and white music) and so lovers of prog or cultured, electronic, avant-garde, jazz, etc. music do not like them very much.

But seeing him live is a very different experience than listening to his records.

Leaving aside the technical skill of him and the members of the band, Springsteen plays 4 hours in concerts.

The first time I saw him, in 1988, he took a 40 minute break between first and second part of the concert, so he played 3 hours 20 minutes. With the passage of time, he has removed the interval and therefore the concert has no breaks and last 3,45 hours. You see he never wants to stop playing. See how sorry he has to go away. Five or six years ago, at the age of 67-68, I saw him do the somersault on stage after more than 3 hours of concert.

Tom Morello, 15 years younger than him, said that the Rage Against the Machine concerts were pure adrenaline rush, they were as searing as a 100m run. The concerts with Springsteen were a surprise for him because he discovered that he was not trained, he compared them to an endurance race that, at the beginning, put him in great difficulty physically and mentally.

All of this has little to do with music. A person may prefer a one and a half hour concert played by... God to a Springsteen concert, longer but perhaps not perfectly played. It is legitimate. In fact, I'm not talking about the musical content or the performance of the instrumentalists.

I'm talking about the emotional matter, the soul and the passion. Springsteen wants to give body and soul until exhaustion, otherwise he doesn't feel like a worker who has given his duty, as if he were a miner or a farmer. There is therefore a work ethic that drives Springsteen concerts. But it is not only this, because Springsteen, like many introverted actors or artists, is a person who struggles to confide in and talk to those who are close to him but at the same time when he goes on stage he opens his heart to the public in an incredible way. And therefore he does not want to interrupt the emotional communion that he establishes with the public, he wants to exasperate the songs in a crescendo that reaches the paroxysm, the sensation of a sonorous orgasm, when you lose control and reach moments similar to the ecstasy of meditation. And so it happens that he transforms an acoustic and slow track like The Ghost of Tom Joad into an epic rock ballad with a mesmeric ending. And try to think what it's like to finish a 4-hour concert with a song like The Ghots of Tom Joad and then, after 15 minutes, while you are taking the stairs to exit the stadium, with the lights on, see that Bruce surprisingly returns to the stage, alone, guitar and harmonica, to sing one last song. It is happened to me.