Springsteen on Broadway: it's just the working, the working, the working life

LIKE AMERICA, like most things in life, there’s an easy, surface-level reading of Bruce Springsteen: stars-and-stripes thick-necked denim-clad bombastic muscle bro - looked kind of dorky before the 80s - who sings about blue-collar workers and cars and chasing girls on Friday nights. Dad-rock alert! But when you really listen to him, read about him, see him sweat before your eyes, that image explodes into multiple layers, as complex as the country he sings about.

Springsteen on Broadway is a fast-track to exploding those layers, the myth laid bare under industrial stage light. The performance makes sense of the feelings his music and live shows give you. On Broadway, Springsteen songs feel like museum exhibits, not in a dull dusty way, but in how he exposes each song on stage, vulnerable, stripped and examined from all angles. Songs as exhibits, until he rattles their bones out to the audience, and builds something new but not-new out of them. The Promised Land, a-capella. The gutsy blues of Born in the USA, how’d Reagan like the sound of that now, anger in plain sight.

I didn’t think I needed Broadway Bruce, thought I knew it all already: the names of his aunts, the shapes of his demons, the way his hometown smells in August rain and November snow. I’d watched him read from his autobiography in a San Francisco theatre in 2016, and wondered if I’d be in for a similar experience. The cynic in me thought the whole venture was easy money.

Well, there was nothing recycled about this experience. And money, yes, but easy? Fuck no. ‘I’ve never worked five days a week - until right now,’ Springsteen says during the show. ‘I don’t like it.’ His point is that as a lifelong musician, he’s completely unqualified to sing about working-class labour, the factory life that's defined both the generation of his time and the main thrust of his music. But his remark is also a nod to the show’s imperceptible toil. Five performances, five days a week, 236 shows in total (a run longer than any Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band tour): seventeen songs laced together with a tight script, over and over, week in week out. This is a kind of strenuous repetition that also belongs to the factory line, and it’s therefore reasonable to consider Springsteen on Broadway as his own warped version of factory work.

But Springsteen’s not mass-producing anything material. On stage, over and over again in factory style, he perpetuates his own mythology – that blue-collar easy read - even as he works to dismantle it.