Bruce Springsteen seemed genuinely pleased with the way his new show had gone over with the crowd at Stockholm's Globe Arena on June 15th, the opening night of the European leg of his tour. "Det ar skitbra att vara i Stockholm," he said in halting Swedish, and if his pronunciation left a little to be desired -- "At least I got Stockholm right," he laughed -- it was easy to understand why he felt that it was "good as shit to be in Stockholm."
For one thing, starting his tour in Sweden meant that Springsteen could finally put some distance between his new show and the media's doubts about his post-E Street Band future. There were no stories in the Swedish press wondering why Human Touch and Lucky Town slipped out of the Top Ten so quickly; the closest any of the Stockholm papers came to complaining about Springsteen was when Expressen's automotive columnist wrote a piece lamenting the lack of car songs on the new albums. Further, both Stockholm shows had been sold out for weeks (U2, by contrast, failed to fill the Globe five nights earlier), with the tour-opening show setting an attendance record (15,800) for the building.
Best of all though, was the show itself. This performance was nothing like the Springsteen shows of old; in fact, the bulk of Springsteen's twenty-six-song set was drawn from Lucky Town, Human Touch and Born in the U.S.A., with only one song each from Tunnel of Love, The River and Darkness on the Edge of Town. It was not, in other words, a show meant to please Springsteen classicists. Yet that hardly dampened the enthusiasm of his Swedish fans. Indeed, the crowd in Stockholm was so bowled over by the show that it kept cheering for six full minutes after the house lights came up.
Why? Most of the excitement may have come from the fact that Springsteen quite simply has never sounded better. Sporting a surprisingly soulful sound, his ten-piece ensemble -- E Street vet Roy Bittan on synths, Shane Fontayne on guitar, Tommy Sims on bass, Zachary Alford on drums, Crystal Taliefero on acoustic guitar and percussion, plus vocalists Bobby King, Angel Rogers, Carol Dennis, Cleo Kennedy and Gia Ciambotti -- gave Springsteen greater musical range that the E Street Band ever did.
Some songs were radically rearranged such as "57 Channels (and Nothin' On)," which jettisoned the jittery rockabilly sound used on Human Touch and instead relied on Fontayne's wah-wah guitar and Taliefero's congas to build a throbbing funk groove, spiked with news sound bites and chants of "No justice, no peace!" There was an even stronger R&B flavor to "Man's Job," where Springsteen played Sam Moore to Bobby King's Dave Prater.
Even "Born in the U.S.A." seemed transformed, from its Hendrixian "Star-Spangled Banner" intro to its lean-and-mean rhythm arrangement. It was almost as if the new band had given Springsteen the means to rediscover his own songs. "My Hometown," for instance, was imbued with a staggering sense of loss, as if an entire way of life had disappeared with the hometown of his youth. But the most stunning reinterpretation of all was "Brilliant Disguise," a song about sneaking around, which Springsteen and wife Patti Scialfa (in one of the two cameos during the show) somehow turned into a moving testament to marital fidelity.
No wonder, then, that by the time Springsteen and company had roared through adrenalized encores like "Glory Days" and "Bobby Jean," the Swedish fans were cheering like maniacs. Which is why "My Beautiful Reward," though a wonderfully apt ending for the show, barely seemed enough for these fans -- after hearing the new Springsteen, it's impossible not to want more.
J.D. CONSIDINE
(RS 636 - August 6, 1992)