Bruce Springsteen, Soul Singer
A few days before that show, my children both decided they wanted to go, too. On show night, while I was waiting with the other photographers to get credentials, Lori and the kids were admitted in to the arena with the other General Admission ticket holders. Springsteen came out with the E Street Band and, beyond what I could hear in the basement, the band ran through several songs including Marvin Gaye's "Can I Get a Witness." To this day, Springsteen has still never performed that song with the E Street Band during a regular concert, but that night, in front of a small gathering of early arrivals including my wife and kids, he dashed it off. So I crossed an item off my bucket list, but I missed that.
When I first heard that Bruce was going to put out an album of soul covers, I thought back to that night. Of course, over the course of a hundred live shows, I've seen Bruce perform many soul classics, and I've seen performances and shows that were openly paying homage to his soul heroes. So I figured I had an idea of what this album would be.
I was wrong.
"Only the Strong Survive" is, for lack of a more immediately better description, a Springsteen sing-along album. It's not quite karaoke, but almost -- and well, I'd pay to hear Bruce do karaoke, anyway. It's Bruce singing vocals for nearly note-perfect recreations of the originals. As Bruce said in a video introducing the first video for the album, "I put my own spin on the singing, and my team mastered and sonically modernized some of the most beautiful songs in the American pop songbook."
That's about as much of a theme as I can find here. And that's... ok.
For me, the overall results are decidedly mixed. This release does highlight Bruce's voice, and he still has plenty to offer. Many of the songs are instantly recognizable classics, but there are also plenty that I never knew. Were I choosing songs for a soul retrospective, I doubt I'd choose the cheesy early '80's Four Tops song, "When She Was My Girl," but it's kind of fun to hear Bruce's take on it, including a rare guitar solo. His take on The Walker Brothers "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" is so wonderful to me that I almost forget that I'm not listening to the original. "Western Union Man" sounds note-bendingly close to what I imagine "Can I Get a Witness" must have sounded like that April evening 10 years ago. And Bruce's take on Dobie Gray's "Soul Days" not only references Sam and Dave, it features Sam Moore singing harmony.
There are others that just don't work for me. I give Bruce props for taking a shot at "I Wish It Would Rain," a song I put on my first mix tape more than 4 decades ago after a thunder storm wiped out an outdoor concert after I'd already arrived; I discovered then that quite a lot of sad songs use that rain metaphor. But on this version, Bruce's vocal leaves me yearning more for David Ruffin's singing in the original than for a repeat spin. And his take on Diana Ross's supremely understated vocal of "Someday We'll Be Together" is just... wrong to my ears. But this is his bucket list, not mine, and if this is what he sings along to, I'll listen along, at least a few times.
Bruce's choices for arrangements are more curious to me. They're perfect... and sterile. Back in the day, originals were often done in live takes, or at least edited down from multiple live tracks. Mistakes were allowed; heck, there's a trumpet goof in the original of "Can I Get a Witness." I don't think it's even possible to watch the video of The Temptations performing "I Wish It Would Rain" without getting chills. But on this new suite of recordings, even tracks with "live" sound such as on Bruce's version of Ben E. King's "Don't Play That Song" (one of the relatively few songs that seems significantly updated as compared to the original; perhaps Bruce based his version more on Jackie Shane's cover of it), the sound is pure. The effect seems almost opposite what I would have imagined to be the intent of an album like this.
This also brings me to the first two videos: Whereas the recordings for this album are basically created on the computer by producer Ron Aniello and studio engineer Rob Lebret, and then layering in Bruce and a limited cast of vocalists and instrumentalists, the Shindig style videos show Bruce miming while fronting bands in front of nearly all white audiences.
The album is fun, but in the end I probably had more fun discovering and re-discovering the original recordings than listening to the new recordings. I've linked several videos from youtube here, they're all worth a watch or three.
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