Orel Family

I prepped for this movie. The catalyst, for me, was watching Martin Scorsese's dry-as-bones film "Beatles '64,"  that so diced-and-spliced things up, mashing together the things I cared about with things that seemed irrelevant to me (I suppose it's interesting in the abstract to see Leonard Bernstein dissect the time signature variations within the 1966 song "She Said She Said," but, really? ), that I found myself going back to the Maysles brothers' film "The First US Visit"  just to see again how exciting and fresh the Beatles were to Americans  in 1964. So I got what I could find to prepare for this film: D.A. Pennebaker's  groundbreaking film about Bob Dylan's 1965 UK Tour, "Don't Look Back,"  that revealed Dylan in metamorphosis yet leaving events to speak for themselves. Then, Scorsese's "No Direction Home,"  a thrilling 200 minute document covering Dylan up through the end of his 1966 UK tour, a...

Bruce Springsteen salutes the crowd - April 1, 2023 Inevitably, someone might ask me, approximately: "you just saw him in Detroit on Wednesday, why would you fly to New York to see more? Especially when it's so  expensive?"  As the hours slipped away on my weather-delayed flight yesterday, I could even entertain a rational point to those questions. Hell, just looking at a setlist that had only 2 changes from the Detroit show 3 days prior, it still might seem fair to ask. Jungleland Trapped. April 1, 2023 But, you see, there was this show. If you were there, you know. You experienced the crowd. You experienced what seemed to be an extra bounce in everyone's step -- in Bruce's case, literally skipping across the stage at times. You experienced "Jungleland," in which Bruce seemed to conjure up a version of himself not seen or heard in decades, and in which, if you closed your eyes, you heard the ghost of Jake Clemons's uncle, too. You heard and saw Max ...

Bruce! Electric! Renew our days as of old! Last night was the 7th annual John Henry's Friends Benefit at The Town Hall in New York, to benefit the Keswell School , where Steve Earle's autistic son John Henry attends. The show featured Steve Earle and the Dukes, Willie Nile, Matt Savage, The Mastersons, Roseanne Cash, and, of course, Bruce Springsteen. It's been more than 5 years since I -- or nearly anyone else in the audience -- saw Bruce play anything  electric. As Steve Earle noted early on, the bar for the benefit shows has been raised pretty high. The first hour of the show featured The Mastersons , who performed two songs off their "new" album (from March, 2020, when the world essentially stopped), pianist Matt Savage (who has autism), Willie Nile , and Roseanne Cash . Nile played a pair of COVID-19 inspired songs, including the brutal "Blood on Your Hands," which he had recorded as a duet with Earle. Cash, performing with her husband John Levent...

September, 1979. I'd just returned home from being in Israel for 6 weeks. Less than a week later, my grandmother suddenly died from a heart attack. Sometime in the immediate aftermath of the returning home to New Jersey from my grandparents' shiva house in Connecticut, the school year started, and I understood that Bruce Springsteen was going to be playing at two of the upcoming "Musicians for Safe Energy" No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden. On Rosh Ha-freaking Shannah. Tickets probably went on sale while I was out of the country, and I had no chance of getting any. There was a girl in my homeroom class, and she  had tickets. Or, at least, she was going. She wasn't even especially excited about it.  I was 17, a hardcore fan, and  shut out. The burn, no doubt distorted by selective recall, lingered for a long time. It would be nearly another 2 years before I'd get to see Springsteen live.  More than 42 years later, the concert film "The Legendary 1...

The most important thing to note about Bruce Springsteen's Opening Night in his return engagement of Springsteen on Broadway, is that there was an opening night of Springsteen on Broadway, of anything  on Broadway, of live music, of entertainment. As Bruce noted in his opening remarks, it was good to see people sitting next to each other, no masks, for his show. Over the past 15 months in the spiritual diaspora, it was easy to lapse in to a mode of thinking in which such an evening seemed too far away to grasp. The vestiges of the pandemic remain, though. Outside the theater, several dozen anti-vaccine activists protested the theater policy that only people vaccinated for COVID-19 would be allowed to enter (and yes, the theater did  check, so if you're thinking of going to this show, make sure you have your evidence). Inside the theater, people crowded the souvenir and $20 drink lines, as if to prove a point that they could. The St. James Theater was not sold out, and secondar...

The set for Springsteen on Broadway. One piano, two microphones. Guitars are off-stage. At about 8:05pm on Friday, I stopped thinking about the money. Yes, this is worth it. That was, more or less, the time at which Growin' Up  started to fill the Walter Kerr Theater. Bruce Springsteen had taken the stage, spoken the magic word... "Balls!" He'd announced his intent to perform his magic trick, his proof of life. And here we were, just 5 minutes in. In the moments without music, I could hear the silence in the hall. When Bruce was playing, the hall overflowed with the lush noise of Bruce's voice (sounding great) and his guitar. The Walter Kerr Theater is tiny by Broadway standards, just 960 seats crammed close together. I'd been there once before, and remembered the bar area that was practically on top of the last row of seats. Space in the theater was so limited that a main souvenir stand was located next door at a hotel. The seating was so tight that ...