Springsteen Challenge Day 19: Favorite Bruce TV Special/Documentary/Movie

This is kind of a strange one.  There haven’t been many good documentaries released about Bruce.  There is the making of Born to Run, known as Wings for Wheels, and the making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, each released with their digitally masterered recording re-releases, but those are in-house, and not particularly objective.  Additionally, there aren’t really any movies out about Bruce.  You could kind of count his appearance in “High Fidelity” as a Bruce movie – he shares a bit of wisdom with John Cusack, but realistically, it’s just a few lines as he tunes his guitar. Plus, I don’t think he’d be all that good an actor.  This leaves TV specials.

Bruce has had a few TV specials, including the MTVUnPlugged MTV special.  That was interesting, because this was the series that MTV made famous by promising to bring in Artists who are normally performing with electric instruments, and break them down to the acoustic level, reverse Dylan style.  The most memorable of these performances was Nirvana’s touching, wonderfully eye-opening performance where the band went acoustic, and the fans loved it.  Everyone wondered how a grunge band, with nearly unintelligible lyrics was going to slow down, play acoustic instruments, and be anything remotely resembling good.  It was phenomenal, and they proved they were more than just the appeal of the grunge wave.

For Bruce, he was invited in the early 1990s.  This proves problematic for many Springsteen fans because this was the rare period in Bruce’s career during which the E Street Band had been disbanded.  Sure, Phantom Dan Federici and the Professor, Roy Bittan were there, as was the first lady of love, Miss (Mrs!) Patti Scialfa (Springsteen!), but this was not the E Street Band.  These were session musicians, and the whole production was just odd.  There was a bit of strange choreography, zero chemistry, and Bruce trying to prove to everyone he was still Bruce Springsteen, and he needed to do other things without the E Street Band. The concert itself started out with an acoustic “red headed woman” – an overt song about performing cunnilingus on his red-headed wife (“listen up, son, you’re life’s been wasted, unless you got down on your knees and tasted a red-headed woman”), which lasted all of two minutes, and was clearly intended as a joke.  He then proclaimed that the bawdy song was all of the acoustic MTV was going to get. Shifting into his full band performance, he played a long electric set, which made zero sense, considering the show was called MTV Unplugged.  Or, wait, well… I guess he decided to rename it “MTVUnPlugged” – tricky, Mr. Springsteen.  Cross out the “un” and you can do whatever you want.

It should be noted that Bruce DID state that the Lucky Town/Human Touch albums weren’t well received by the public.  He joked about it in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech that the public didn’t like the happy songs.  But, by and large, other than some nice renditions off of the Lucky Town album, and a few E Street standbys that felt weird coming from not the E Street Band (Springsteen loyalists refer to that band as the “other band,”) it’s a pretty big miss by Bruce.  I should note, he did redeem himself a few years later, playing at the MTV VMAs with the Wallflowers – he ripped “One Headlight” from the feeble grasp of Jakob Dylan and made it his own.  I still really like that cover, though, it’s not really Bruce’s – he shared lead vocals with Jakob, including that “singing into the same Mic” thing that he and Stevie do so well.  He even busted out a few classic Boss “jamming hard on the guitar” goofy faces.

Suffice to say, we don’t need to go far down the road, corporately, to get to my favorite Bruce special.  When I was getting in to Bruce, and had my deep infatuation with the song “Thunder Road,” Bruce decided it was time to pay Viacom back for changing the rules on “Unplugged” – he played a “VH1 Storytellers” episode, in which he performed some songs acoustically (it helped that Devils and Dust was an acoustic album – Lucky Town and Human Touch were not) and describing the stories behind them.   Storytellers is a show that began in the mid 90s, and was wildly popular, with dozens of episodes per year, but fell by the wayside by the early to mid 2000s.  In fact, when it was announced that Bruce would be performing, I thought to myself, “They still do VH1 Storytellers?” In fact, Bruce was one of 4 bands to perform in 2005, after no bands performed on Storytellers in 2004 (Bruce, Coldplay, Green Day, and Dave Matthews Band,) and a total of one band each year performed in 2002 and 2003.

The setlist was phenomenal.  I have a ripped copy on my iPhone, and I own the DVD.  The edited for TV version guts much of the fun, but the full DVD release, which shows everything, is glorious.  There are the poignant moments, like when Bruce talks about sons and mothers, and what happens when that bond is severed while introducing Black Cowboys, as well as the discussion of Jesus as an earthly son and his mother Mary in “Jesus was an Only Son.”  It also captures the discussion of the changes Manfred Mann made to “Blinded By The Light” (Bruce: “cut loose like a deuce”; Manfred Mann: “Revved up like a douche”) which, Bruce jokingly speculates are the reason their version charted #1 and not his (I prefer his… duh.) Additionally, on back to back songs (“Jesus was an Only Son” and “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day”), Bruce forgets to put on his Harmonica, getting a few bars into the song, and realizing it (“Well, Jesus was… oh wait, I’m fuckin’ up” and “Well, funny…. *music stops* Harmonica… Damn!”)  It was an intimate, yet revealing look at his songs.  It was where we learn that Thunder Road’s most important line (or, at least, in MY opinion…) is “The door’s open, but the ride ain’t free” – Bruce was telling us that we had to join him – we had to put in effort to come along on his journey with him.

It was a look into the mind of Bruce Springsteen – a man who, by all accounts, doesn’t need his ego stroked any more, nor does he need to be humored, but he humored us by poking fun at his massive ego stroking on the stage in New Jersey for the VH1 Storytellers appearance.  He’s a funny, honest, thoughtful individual, and we got to see that, and see a bit into his new album, his older albums, and the stories behind them.  Plus, he played a fantastic version of the aforementioned Thunder Road, saying “Well, that’s close enough for Rock and Roll.”

Tomorrow’s Topic: Favorite Bruce Anecdote (from him) – Oh boy… if you’re one of the three people not married to me who read this, you might want to strap yourself in.  I have a feeling this is going to be a doozy.