Springsteen Challenge Day 27: Favorite Bruce Instrument

This one is easy.  Bruce Springsteen plays a lot of instruments. On the Devils and Dust tour, I saw him play the acoustic guitar, the piano, a pump organ, a keyboard, the harmonica, and a bass stomp pad.  He’s pretty damned good at all of them.  When he goes on tour, he has guitar cases for the purpose of keeping his guitars in an kind of environmental stasis.  In fact, given all guitars that are brought on tour – Garry’s bass guitars, Soozie’s acoustics, Nils’ array of guitars, Stevie’s variety of stringed instruments – small and large, as well as the guitars of the family Springsteen – both Bruce AND Patti, it’s safe to say the guitar tech is one of the most important members of Bruce’s road crew.  He’s so important, in fact, that most people know him by name – Kevin Buell.  At one of the MetLife stadium shows, during Dancing in the Dark, Bruce pulled a woman on stage with a sign requesting a Dancing in the Dark dance with Kevin (she didn’t get it.)  I think you can see where I’m going with this.  Bruce is a rocker.  The tool of a rock and roll star is a guitar.  But my favorite Bruce instrument isn’t *just* a guitar. It’s the guitar.

Bruce has recorded entire albums on the acoustic guitar.  Sometimes, it looks like he feels more comfortable playing one.  After all, his hero, Elvis, played the acoustic guitar (yes, he played an electric, too, but he’s most famous slinging an acoustic guitar around on the Ed Sullivan show – from the waist up, of course.) But it’s not a rocker’s role to play the acoustic guitar exclusively.

He can play the piano well enough to show off those talents in concert, performing some of his songs beautifully while tickling the ivories.  I love his version of “Incident on 57^th Street” on the Live in Barcelona DVD.  He also performs a version of “Spirit in the Night” immediately before “Incident” in which he forgets either the lyrics or the key, but he stops himself, goes back, and attempts to play it again to either jog his memory, or find the key in his ear.  He’s alone on stage during this, though this was an E Street Band show – he gave them a break while he dazzled the Spaniards.  These issues on piano aside (Bruce said, after playing a hit-or-miss piano version of “Leap of Faith” in Buffalo that the mistakes were intentional), he plays quite well.  “Thunder Road” at VH1 Storytellers was on Piano, as was “Jesus Was An Only Son.”  The entire “Born to Run” album was composed on a piano.  I like Bruce’s piano versions of his guitar-driven songs.  But Bruce’s electric guitar is the instrument of choice for me.

When it comes to Bruce guitars, electric guitars, anyway, there is only one.  The banged up, beaten Fender on the cover of Born to Run is one of the most infamous, continuously played guitars in the history of Rock and Roll.  Bruce plays it the way it’s meant to be played – hard.  He plucks it furiously, doing the windmill, the chop, and flinging it around his neck, sometimes getting it going so fast as Max taps the cymbals, egging him on.  When he transitions out of a song, he will unplug, pull the strap from over his head, and fling the guitar up into the air, it spiraling on three axes, for the aforementioned Kevin Buell to corral in mid air, and hustle backstage to re-tune before the next time he’ll need it.  Bruce does this with all the guitars he plays, acoustic, electric, and otherwise. At one point, he was errant in his throw – going higher instead of further.  Buell made a fantastic diving catch, saving the guitar.  No greater a tragedy would be if Bruce’s guitar, which I call Excalibur – the sword pulled from the stone by the rightful wielder – were to fall with a crash to the stage, splintering like one of Pete Townshend’s many guitars.

The guitar itself is a FrankenGuitar – it sports a telecaster body with an Esquire neck.  It is unique in and of itself, and it has survived since the 1970s.  Bruce’s treatment of it, throwing it while on stage, windmilling it around his neck, the strap holding on for dear life, and pressing the strings and frets against his mic stand to rake them up and down the neck, creating a shrill wall of noise, age the guitar like a four pack a day smoker in Florida.

And, the worst, greatest offense of all – worst in that he leaves the care of his guitar to the hungry fingers of the tramps in the front row, greatest because I want to be one of those front row tramps lucky enough to participate in the active destruction of Excalibur, if just for one moment – is that, during Born to Run, when the musical construction of the song breaks down completely, and the band is through finding the notes, and just making noise with their instruments – The Professor and Charlie mashing keys on their keyboards, Max hammering and thumping with reckless abandon, Stevie, Garry, and Nils ripping at the strings on their guitars until their fingers bleed – Bruce walks to the front of the stage, drops to both knees, and lets his guitar hang down within the grasp of the fans. They reach up and start plucking at the strings, adding to the wall of sound before Bruce stands up, skips back to the mic, and shouts “OneTwoThreeFour The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive!” and the band rips back into the music of Born to Run.  Those moments – the chance to hold the king’s scepter, sit at the President’s desk – these are the creation of man moments.  And Bruce’s instrument – his most recognizable instrument is the one he lets the fans play in concert, during his most famous song.  That is my favorite Bruce Springsteen instrument.

Tomorrow*’s Topic: A Video of Bruce. (100% Chance of there being a YouTube link)

 *-Unless Hurricane Sandy knocks out my power/internet