Male mysticism. Thunder road at its peak as I rolled forward - in Dad's SAAB…
Although the Boss (sickly silly nickname) is not one of my absolute favorites, it is easy to line up a seven-hell mass of amazing music that still formed the soundtrack to (parts of) my life.
The whole The River, of course , saw him on Hovet that tour in 1981, the earliest hits I experienced in retrospect, Born in the USA and the other earrings from the 1980s and then the molten plate Nebraska - which became my favorite after Sean Penn did the fine macho-drama Indian Runner based on the epic song Highway Patrolman.
In this visual companion to the new album Western stars, Bruce Springsteen's music becomes the soundtrack of his own life. But no, no one hears the old triumphs here, instead it is the country-infected record that is played from start to finish, from a stage located in the legend's own barn. Audiences consist of a small crowd of loved ones. The band is almost as many, pure symphony orchestra (counting about fifteen violins and cellos).
Between the songs we are released into the open , in the pictorial middle talk where an elderly and wise Springsteen talks thoughtfully about life, death and everything in between; testifies, among other things, to how he has had trouble coping with his own destructiveness. But no real walk along the avenues of memories is not what the trailer tricked me into believing - and hoping for.
Just the barn, the songs and the talk.
The concert film as such is basically hopeless only by its form. It doesn't usually add much to the concert experience, rarely a memorable film story either, and Bruce Springsteen and co-director Thom Zimny do not directly breathe new life into the genre, but they do not have that ambition, either.
The arrangement is simple but still winning. If you start the music now. If you do not, you should obviously stay far away. But it is precisely the low level of ambition and the humble look that makes the most pretentious monologues, and the slightly saggy cowboy nostalgia, not make me grope for the cushion.
The icon also generously offers the background and meaning of each song - which is a nice exception to all the cultural creators who usually dismiss every question about a work's meaning with the provocative phrase "The meaning lies in the eye of the beholder". In the first scene we see wild horses blasting across the prairie, in the next a rough man's hand in close-up where it lies on the steering wheel of a Chevy truck (type).
The same scenes recur at the end of the film, but where an equally colored woman's hand is placed on top of the man's, it gives a small hug. Mrs Patti Scialfas is to be assumed.
The man is no longer alone, not “A poor lonsome cowboy, a long long way from home” - the pictures say. That, and that male mysticism is dispelled, has played its part. Bruce Springsteen has come home - and he's feeling pretty good after all. Feels a little nice.