B R U C E !!!!!!

I recently read a post to a thread about Broadway’s GOLDEN AGE..

Which referred to the music of Bruce Springsteen in the following way:

"And I’d rather take one good, well-crafted, intelligent and adult Sondheim song over the entire repertory of monotonous, instantly forgettable and adolescent drivel by Springsteen and his kind--as will posterity"

Bruce Springsteen, in my humble opinion, is the Schubert of his generation.

For those Broadway-philes who never reach “out of the box” so to speak and have no idea who Schubert was, as he never wrote the score to a Gwen Verdon show, Franz Peter Schubert (1797 - 182 was a very great songwriter whose music has touched and moved generations and is still being performed today.

Schubert's music was written to "speak" to anyone from the aristocracy to the working man.

(I don't know many construction workers who plotz over "The Miller's Son"..)

Bruce Springsteen has written consistently intelligent, moving and often times, beautiful music..

His talent as a lyricist is extraordinary.

Take for an example these words from his song; “The River”;

"Then I got Mary pregnant
and man that was all she wrote
And for my nineteenth birthday
I got a union card and a wedding coat
We went down to the courthouse
and the judge put it all to rest
No wedding day smiles, no walk down the aisle
No flowers, no wedding dress"

Unlike Sondheim, Springsteen is not writing to “impress”, to show how clever he can be…

(“Oh look at the diatonic scale I just threw in” .... or .....”Oh, Look at how many different ways I can use “career” in a sentence”)

Springsteen is writing to tell a story in as simple a way as possible ...in a way that anyone could understand.

Schubert did the very same thing.

Take “Wreck on the Highway” for example:

"An ambulance finally came and took him to Riverside
I watched as they drove him away
And I thought of a girlfriend or a young wife
And a state trooper knocking in the middle of the night
To say your baby died in a wreck on the highway

Sometimes I sit up in the darkness
And I watch my baby as she sleeps
Then I climb in bed and I hold her tight
I just lay there awake in the middle of the night
Thinking 'bout the wreck on the highway"

…….and may I bring up a rather interesting point, Miss. Bernadette Peters, whom most people on this board seem to consider the ultimate Broadway star and go gaga over anything she does no matter how miscast, used to perform Bruce Springsteen's, ” Wreck on the Highway”, quite often in her concerts during the early 80’s…

I mean if his music is good enough for Bernie...well then it must be good enough for everybody else ..right...

Sondheim writes for a select few.

Springsteen writes for everyone.

Updated On: 8/6/03 at 10:57 AM

"Tool" is great band.."Lateralus" is a freakin helluva an album!

i spent many years as a Bruce groupie long before Born in the USA... he is one of the most amazing live performers I have ever seen.

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So Voiceanth your very tenuous reason for posting a thread about someone whose had nothing to do with Broadway, ever is that Bernadette Peters once sang his one of his songs in concert in the 80's? I mean, this is a Broadway discussion board after all.

Do you even like theatre at all?

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Ok, I'm a skimmer so I missed that part of your post. And while I wouldn't call him monotonous, I wouldn't say he was the Schubert of his generation either.

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FindingNamo:

I most certainly do explain how Springsteen is the Schubert of his generation...

Schubert wrote songs that in their day were considered the equivalent of "pop" songs today...

They were written to appeal to everyone...everyone meaning a broad base of people.

Springsteen wrote the same way…he just wanted to tell a tale.... anyone who knows anything about him knows he didn’t sit with his guitar and write using a rhyming dictionary….

He didn’t sit there going

“Oh lets see..what rhymes with messy…let me look it up…I know..”

That's the sorrowful précis.
It's very messy…

Who the hell use Précis in a normal conversation..????

It’s there for you to say “Oh, isn’t Sondheim clever”…

Springsteen tries to tell a story in as simple a way as possible…and most of the time does it in a melodically gorgeous way…see his song “Secret Garden”…

Plain and simple, the man just sold out 10 nights at Giant Stadium.... hundreds of thousands of tickets sold in a one day..

Are all those people fools? I think not!

Could Sondheim...could anyone on Broadway right now be able to say the sold out ONE NIGHT in a 50,000-seat stadium...

He appeals to people that don't feel the need to use précis in a conversation….

It comes down to appeal..... something, somewhere went wrong with Broadway and it's ability to make masses of people relate to it...

..and I think there are a number of "Broadway" lovers who LIKE that fact. Like they’re in their own little cult...like they are different from those people at a Springsteen concert...

..Dare I even say, makes them feel superior to those folks at a Springsteen concert.

...As opposed to limited..... Which they are...

It seems as if you are saying that Bruce is dumbed down enough that he has mass appeal. That maybe he is not the lowest common denomenator, but that he is a common denomenator.

Sort of like Jay Leno to Sondheim's Letterman. Or Charlie Rose.

You also seem to be implying that the ability to sell out stadia, like Metallica does, is somehow a sign of "keeping it real authenticity" and not the result of behind-the-scenes calculation, a different form of cleverness but just the other side of the coin from Sondheim's. He puts it in the music, others put it in the marketing.

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Springsteen has been an outlaw creator his entire career, battling with the marketing people, putting out non-commercial records like 'Nebraska' (which is completely acoustic blues)and 'The Ghost of Tom Joad' (the latter of which won a Grammy for Best FOLK Album.) It's a cliche but it's true: he didn't come to the mainstream, the mainstream came to him (and remember this is the same cat that stopped Ronald Reagan from trying to use his 'Born in the USA' as a campaign slogan and who has never sold a song to a commercial or for advertising.)

Every creator has a denominator of fans. Sondheim's not TRYING to alienate people, he just writes what he writes and it's not something everyone is into. Which is cool. It's what makes being an artist great. The fact that Bruce is able to be criticially and musically acclaimed as well as being one of the most popular rock writers in history is a marvel as well. He truly gets to be both artist AND megastar.

And he got there his way, by doing the music he wanted and by playing and playing and playing so as many people as possible had a chance to get into his music and hear his stories. There was no grand marketing scheme behind Bruce Springsteen and there's certainly nothing 'dumbed down' about his work. It's marvelously layered and stylish rock/blues/folk music.

His band is bigger than some Broadway orchestras, for Pete's sake!

Normal everyday people may not use a word like précis, but why wouldn't worldly, sophisticated Phyllis Stone use it? You'll notice Sondheim didn't put that into the mouth of plain-Jane Phoenix housewife Sally Durant Plummer, or sad sack travelling salesman Buddy Plummer. If Sondheim wrote such a character-specific lyric solely to impress, well, he sure as hell impressed me.

I think that’s what bothered me and made me post my "rant" or "essay"...

The quote about Springsteen, a respected, multiple Grammy winner, being adolescent monotonous, instantly forgettable and adolescent drivel...

The snobbism and the ignorance that usually is behind an uninformed remark like that…that burns me….and I have seen and heard it numerous times in the Broadway community…

I may have knocked Sondheim but I attended the original cast of “Sunday in the Park with George” and “Into The Woods’ …and listened to everyone of the cast albums…

Some I like, most I don’t..

I highly doubt the poster who knocked Springsteen has even listened to more than one song of his…..if that.

How do you gather an informed opinion from that…

You.. See, I think there is this attitude that we are all supposed to "respect" a Broadway composer yet treat a Pop/Rock composer, never mind performer, like so much garbage.

I know it's really important for people to buy into an entire image with certain artists, even if the image is the image of not having an image. It's as entirely fabricated as anything Christina Aguilera's handlers create for her: "I know, be trampy now to signify you're a grown up and in control!"

Jon Landau, Springsteen's manager, is the svengali behind the image. He has been the architect and he has done his job beautifully, especially if he has managed to convince you that it is all just off-the-cuff casual "authenticity." And that's exactly what it is, "authenticity."

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Well, that's good. Then you know there was in fact a grand marketing scheme.

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Bruce doesn't write for everyone anymore. His latest: nothing but pure bleeding-heart liberal garbage. Springsteen is okay by me before "We Are The World," circa 1985.