Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 31, 1992 TAG: 9203310112
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JON PARELES THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Little of that has rubbed off on Springsteen's two new albums, "Human Touch" (designated his 10th album, largely recorded in 1989-1990) and "Lucky Town" (his 11th album, recorded in 1991).
Springsteen deliberately - everything he does seems deliberate - stands clear of the noise and ambiguity of 1990s rock. He has something to protect: his likability as the last sincere superstar. Springsteen has sold millions of albums and posed for his share of magazine covers and video clips; he takes his shirt off and strokes a woman in an artfully shadowed bedroom in the video for "Human Touch."
Yet he can still come across as someone outside show business, a rare rock musician who sees his profession not as media manipulation but as writing basic, four-minute, four-chord songs.
He doesn't sell his music for commercials and hasn't accepted corporate sponsorship for his tours; his most recent public performances have been at benefit concerts, for Amnesty International and the Christic Institute, a liberal public-interest law firm.
Although he has spawned at least a dozen imitators on major labels, from John Cafferty to Jon Bon Jovi to Marc Cohn, he hasn't tried to outmaneuver them by shifting musical direction. His long public silences and slow-changing style seem to be generated by something distinct from the desire to serve a novelty-seeking pop market. Which doesn't mean that "Human Touch" or "Lucky Town" won't be No. 1 on the charts next week.
From his first album in 1973, Springsteen sought to reclaim and personalize all the sounds he loved, whether they were from the artificial world of pop or the purportedly more authentic areas of rock, country and blues. He brought together the pop sheen of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound with the imagistic barrage of Bob Dylan's lyrics and the down-home punch of rockabilly guitars and gospel keyboards.
Later, he moved away from theatrical suites (like "Jungleland" or "Rosalita") and simplified his songwriting to invoke older sources: the homely narratives of Woody Guthrie, the spartan heartbreak of Hank Williams.
Even in the 1970s, Springsteen was a stylistic conservative, a sonic archivist. He would question the assumptions behind the oldies' lyrics - love, growing up and finding a moral purpose were never as easy in Springsteen songs as they sounded in rock's earlier years - but the musical verities were secure.
They still are. Springsteen and his co-producers (Chuck Plotkin, Jon Landau and Roy Bittan) know how to make drums kick, keyboards gleam and guitars peal. The strutting rockabilly riffs of "Gloria's Eyes," the frat-party drumbeat of "All or Nothing at All," the jubilant choruses of "Leap of Faith," the minor-key twang and cracked singing of "Lucky Town" and the serene keyboards of "Human Touch" may not be new gambits, but they do the job.
Springsteen still pays tributes on the new albums. "Man's Job" uses the chugging rhythms, rising melody lines and vulnerable tone of Roy Orbison, while the introduction to "Real World" refers to the cowbell and opening phrase of Free's "All Right Now." Springsteen's backup singers include Sam Moore, of Sam and Dave, and Bobby Hatfield, of the Righteous Brothers.
The paradox is that the rock Springsteen cherishes and preserves once meant rebellion and change; it was the sound of outcasts and lowlifes breaking into the public sphere.
For Springsteen now, the twang of hand-picked guitars and the kick of real drums represent a fortress for a family man, a defense against a post-modern world of rootlessness and moral ambiguity, of synthesized sounds and video games. The five-year wait for "Lucky Town" and "Human Touch" has only heightened the sense of isolation.
Despite his musical preferences, Springsteen lives in the post-modern present. He may not sample other people's music, but on the new albums he quotes lyrics ("love in vain," "tumbling dice"), titles ("The Long Goodbye," "The Big Muddy") and guitar lines; like the hip-hop he never acknowledges, his songs are pastiches, using their allusions to show how times have changed. Youthful exuberance only carried him into the mid-1970s; since then, he has been self-conscious, pondering just how he can maintain a kind of truthfulness.
During the 1980s, he spun stories about working-class despair and the crumbling of families, cities, hopes, making arena anthems out of bleak tales like "Born in the U.S.A." Now, he's separated from the last glimmers of populism. While politicians are making 1992 the year of the middle class, wherever that is, for Springsteen the only community that's left is his family.
Even his backup musicians have changed; the E Street Band is gone, except for Bittan, its keyboardist. On "Lucky Town," Springsteen recorded nearly every instrument himself at his home studio, adding Gary Mallaber on drums.
For "Human Touch," he worked with a basic group of Bittan, Randy Jackson on bass and Jeff Porcaro on drums. The two albums are distinct: most of "Lucky Town" is harder and denser, with tightly packed layers of guitars, while "Human Touch" is more open, more varied and, over all, more triumphal.
Yet both albums immediately sound familiar, bringing together the introspection of "Tunnel of Love" with the punch of the 1980 "The River" and 1984s "Born in the U.S.A."
As it has been since "Darkness on the Edge of Town" in 1978, Springsteen's voice is weary, grizzled, diligently clinging to its narrow melody lines; now and then, it breaks free to single-mindedly shout a whole song, but either way, it's a voice that hasn't heard a good joke in a decade.
The messages are familiar, too. On "Human Touch," the singer agonizes over love, suffers bouts of jealousy and eventually decides that love is no panacea, but it's better than nothing.
The ideas on the two albums overlap; they are Springsteen's long-term obsessions. "Lucky Town" includes "If I Should Fall Behind," a vow of honest if not everlasting affection that sounds like something from Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks," and "Leap of Faith," a gospelly rocker about sex as sacrament. Meanwhile, "Human Touch" includes "Cross My Heart," which broods about the "spaces in between" wrong and right.
On both albums, the singer finds a haven, temporary but precious, as a family man, cherishing his wife and children. "Human Touch" ends with "Pony Boy," which must be a lullaby for Springsteen's two sons; it's a finger-picked ballad that recalls Woody Guthrie's songs for children.
And in "Souls of the Departed," on "Lucky Town," the singer thinks about death in the Persian Gulf and the Los Angeles ghetto, and worries about his own child: "I want to build me a wall so high nothing can burn it down."
He knows that wall is already in place. The Springsteen who used to write working-class narratives has withdrawn, recognizing that after a decade as a rock superstar and millionaire, he wouldn't sound credible if he sang about punching a clock.
Instead, however, Springsteen is starting to sound like a man wrapped up in private preoccupations, running in circles. As the two albums recall previous arrangements and melodies, they also revive images from old songs; Springsteen mentions rivers more often on the new albums than he did on two LP's of "The River."
It's easy to like and respect Springsteen. His songs invariably sound hard-won and homemade, every drumbeat and guitar solo making its point. (Springsteen definitely used part of the five-year gap to practice guitar.) Any performer who has spent more than two decades shaping his own style shouldn't have to jettison it to stay current; better a diehard than a fashion plate.
But where Springsteen used to aim for synthesis, he now prefers stasis. In both words and music, Springsteen suggests there's nothing between trend-hopping and bunkered purity, that he and his nuclear family are better off alone, that the outside world is just "57 channels and nothin' on" - a gloomier message than anything in the songs themselves.
In the end, "Human Touch" and "Lucky Town" offer the twanging, stomping, pensive, troubled, well-crafted sound of retreat.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB