Playing With the Other Band

For my first post about my favorite musician, Bruce Springsteen, I go back and listen to a concert from one of the under-considered stretches of his career.

I really didn’t want to dive into a Bruce Springsteen post so quickly. It just seemed to obvious. The name of this newsletter, taken from a track from The River era, in addition to my rather unabashed love for the Boss made it all inevitable but I’d hoped I could delay that a little bit. But I’m finally caving and doing a Springsteen-centric post. However, I tried to steer away from something too obvious. Thus, I decided I’d listen to one of the officially released recordings of a concert with Springsteen and “the other band.”

For those of you not as enmeshed in E Street lore as I am… after the Tunnel of Love Express Tour, Springsteen disbanded the E Street Band. The Boss released two albums (that hit shelves on the exact same day—March 31, 1992—no less), Human Touch and Lucky Town, that featured quite a few session musicians (save for E Street Band member Roy Bittan).

It probably goes without saying but this is a stretch of Springsteen’s career that’s not really amongst my favorites. On those two albums, there are some songs I like (“Lucky Town,” “Human Touch,” “If I Should Fall Behind” all stand out) but I love that E Street Band sound so much and feel such a loyalty to them… it’s really hard to listen to the stuff that doesn’t feature them¹. Generally, with the songs that were written during this stretch, I prefer live post-reunion performances of with with the E Street-ers rather than the album version.

When it came time to mount the tour in support of these albums, Springsteen could not get all the same musicians that worked on those albums to join him on the road. Thus, he set out to put together a touring band (that became known as “The Other Band”).

That backing group featured:

• Shane Fontayne – guitar

• Tommy Sims – bass

• Zachary Alford – drums

• Roy Bittan – keyboards

• Crystal Taliefero – guitar, saxophone, percussion & background vocals

• Bobby King – background vocals

• Gia Ciambotti – background vocals

• Carol Dennis – background vocals

• Cleopatra Kennedy – background vocals

• Angel Rogers – background vocals

• Patti Scialfa – guest appearances for guitar & harmony vocals

The Springsteen Archives have put out four shows from this tour and I decided to fire up the recording from the 7/25/1992 show in East Rutherford, NJ.

Here’s the setlist for that show (going through song-by-song didn’t seem like a good idea either for me as a writer or you as a reader) and a link to where you can purchase it from the Springsteen archives.

A lot of what one hears about this stretch of Springsteen’s career (especially live) is that he was moving towards a more explicitly R&B/soul-affected sound. One place where you hear that, to an interesting effect is on the performance of “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” I thought the use of backing vocals was a nice flourish and a way to turn a pretty straight ahead rock song into something almost gospel music-inflected. Bruce’s voice and phrasing even has a Bob Dylan-esque quality on this song.

“Glory Days” and “Hungry Heart” both have a bit of this as well at different points in the performances. It really speaks to the absence of Clarence Clemons and that element of the band’s sound that they need to do other things to make up for that lack of saxophone. But I at least like that he does something (slightly) different with those songs. I’m always fascinated with live performances of Nebraska songs with any backing band and “Open All Night” is no exception. It sound almost like some kind of demented Eddie Cochran track (those are words of praise). In terms of the stuff from the E Street Band era (though obviously that song, being on Nebraska, did not actually feature the E Street Band), that was my favorite of this show with the solo acoustic performance of “Thunder Road” at the very end of the show coming in a close second.

The other “classic” Springsteen songs they performed all felt so… bland. They were fine, don’t get me wrong. But whether having listened to the recordings of the earlier E Street Band shows or having gone to some of the latter day concerts… these ones were just not as good. “Born to Run” is the greatest song of all-time and this version just felt so lukewarm. The band didn’t feel as important or in sync with Springsteen like it was with the E Street guys. Here, it’s very much just Bruce playing with a band whereas it was Bruce AND the E Street Band. There’s not the synergy that allows those songs to be so transcendent.

Thinking about the songs that Springsteen was featuring on this tour, “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)” really didn’t work for me, particularly with the splicing in of audio clips taken from the televised news. It felt like something from ZooTV U2, which worked for that band but put in the midst of a pretty straightforward Springsteen set it really clashed. Also songs like “Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won’t Do)” and “Souls of the Departed” all felt self-consciously theatrical in a way that the best Bruce stuff isn’t self conscious and deliberate about.

The best songs, perhaps appropriately enough, were some of the ones that Springsteen wrote around this time. “Living Proof” and “Lucky Town” worked for me and even songs that I otherwise wouldn’t think too much of— “Roll of the Dice” and “Leap of Faith”—sound a bit better and more fully realized. They’re not ones high up there in my rankings of favorite Springsteen songs, but I really enjoyed how they sounded live with this “other” band.

The stretch in Springsteen’s career that reminds me sonically of this one was probably the 2013-2014 tours in the wake of Clarence Clemons’s death when he was promoting Wrecking Ball and High Hopes. Specifically, I’m thinking about his use during those shows of backing vocalists and a full horn section (not just a saxophone). But even though those shows featured that more “professional” R&B sound (something different from the E Street bar/garage band sound), there was also that power that comes with using the E Street Band members you don’t get with this group.

It gets into that question of what do you do when an artist wants to do something different than what they’re best known for? You don’t want to limit a musician but also when it’s so clear where someone’s strengths are as a musician how can you want them to go away from that?

I get Bruce not wanting to keep doing the same thing, especially after the massive success of Born in the USA, but it also doesn’t feel… fair to have something so special and then turn away from it. Listening to a show from that stretch when the E Street Band was disbanded confirms that feeling within me, particularly as it pertains to Springsteen.

1. The Sessions Band, with which Springsteen did a record of Pete Seeger songs, makes a little more sense because that’s such a different sound but even that album is one I don’t listen to as much as any of the ones he did with the E Street Band.